Chaucer.
Now we come to a Poet of these times; not a poet by courtesy, not a small poet, but a real and a great one. His name is Chaucer. You may not read him; you may find his speech too old-fashioned to please you; you may not easily get through its meaning; but if you do, and come to study him with any warmth, the more you study him the more you will like him. And this—not because there are curious and wonderful tales in his verse to interest you; not because your passion will be kindled by any extraordinary show of dramatic power; but because his humor, and gentleness, and grace of touch, and exquisite harmonies of language will win upon you page by page, and story by story.
He was born—probably in London—some time during the second quarter of the fourteenth century;[40] and there is reason to believe that an early home of his was in or near Thames Street, which runs parallel with the river,—a region now built up and overshadowed with close lines of tall and grimy warehouses. But the boy Chaucer, living there five hundred and more years ago, might have caught between the timber houses glimpses of cultivated fields lying on the Southwark shores; and if he had wandered along Wallbrook to Cheapside, and thence westerly by Newgate to Smithfield Common—where he may have watched tournaments that Froissart watched, and Philippa, queen of Edward III., had watched—he would have found open country; and on quiet days would have heard the birds singing there, and have seen green meadows lying on either side the river Fleet—which river is now lost in sewers, and is planted over with houses.
On Ludgate Hill, in that far-off time, rose the tall and graceful spire of old St. Paul’s, and underneath its roof was a vista of Gothic arches seven hundred feet in length. The great monastery of the Templars—and of the Knights of St. John—where we go now to see that remnant of it, called the Temple Church,—had, only shortly before, passed into the keeping of the Lawyers; the Strand was like a country road, with great country-houses and gardens looking upon the water; Charing Cross was a hamlet midway between the Temple and a parish called Westminster, where a huge Abbey Church stood by the river bank.
Some biographers have labored to show that Chaucer was of high family—with titles in it. But I think we care very little about this; one story, now fully accredited, makes his father a vintner, or wine-dealer, with a coat-of-arms, showing upon one half a red bar upon white, and upon the other white on red; as if—hints old Thomas Fuller—’twas dashed with red wine and white. This escutcheon with its parti-colored bars may be seen in the upper left corner of the portrait of Chaucer, which hangs now in the picture-gallery at Oxford. And—for that matter—it was not a bad thing to be a vintner in that day; for we have record of one of them who, in the year after the battle of Poitiers, entertained at his house in the Vintry, Edward King of England, John King of France, David King of Scotland, and the King of Cyprus. And he not only dined them, but won their money at play; and afterward, in a very unking-like fashion—paid back the money he had won.
Chaucer was a student in his young days; but never—as old stories ran—at either Cambridge or Oxford; indeed, there is no need that we place him at one or the other. There were schools in London in those times—at St. Paul’s and at Westminster—in either of which he could have come by all the scholarly epithets or allusions that appear in his earlier poems; and for the culture that declares itself in his riper days, we know that he was more or less a student all his life—loving books, and proud of his fondness for them, and showing all up and down his poems traces of his careful reading and of an observation as close and as quick.
It is the poet’s very self, who, borne away in the eagle’s clutch amongst the stars, gets this comment from approving Jove[41]:
Thou hearest neither that nor this,
For when thy labor all done is,
And hast made all thy reckiningës
In stead of rest and of new thingës,
Thou goest homë to thine house anon
And all so dombe as any stone,
Thou sittest at another bokë
Till fully dazed is thy lokë.
But though we speak of Chaucer as bookish and scholarly, it must not be supposed that he aimed at, or possessed the nice critical discernment, with respect to the literary work of others, which we now associate with highest scholarly attainments; it may well happen that his bookish allusions are not always “by the letter,” or that he may misquote, or strain a point in interpretation. He lived before the days of exegetical niceties. He is attracted by large effects; he searches for what may kindle his enthusiasms, and put him upon his own trail of song. Books were nothing to him if they did not bring illumination; where he could snatch that, he burrowed—but always rather toward the light than toward the depths. He makes honey out of coarse flowers; not so sure always—nor much caring to be sure—of the name and habitudes of the plants he rifles. He stole not for the theft’s sake, but for the honey’s sake; and he read not for cumulation of special knowledges, but to fertilize and quicken his own spontaneities.
Nor was this poet ever so shapen to close study, but the woods or the birds or the flowers of a summery day would take the bend from his back, and straighten him for a march into the fields:
——There is gamë none,
That from my bookës maketh me to gone,
Save certainly whan that the month of Maie
Is comen, and that I heare the foulës sing,
And that the flowris ginnen for to spring—
Farewell my booke, and my devocion!
And swift upon this in that musical “Legende of Good Women,” comes his rhythmical crowning of the Daisy—never again, in virtue of his verse, to be discrowned—
——above all the flowris in the mede
Thanne love I moste these flowris white and rede;
Soche that men callin Daisies in our toun
To ’hem I have so grete affectionn
As I said erst, whan comin is the Maie,
That in my bedde there dawith me no daie
That I n’ am up, and walking in the mede
To sene this floure ayenst the sunnë sprede,
As she that is of all flowris the floure,
Fulfilled of all vertue and honoure
And evir alikë faire and freshe, of hewe,
And evir I love it and ever alikë newe.
These lines of his have given an everlasting perfume to that odorless flower.
How it befell that this son of a vintner came first to have close association with members of the royal household—household of the great Edward III.—we cannot tell; but it is certain that he did come at an early day to have position in the establishment of the King’s son, Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence; he was sometime valet, too, of Edward III., and in other years a familiar protégé of John of Gaunt—putting his poet’s gloss upon courtly griefs and love-makings.
It is certain, moreover, that in the immediate service of either Prince or King, he went to the wars—as every young man of high spirit in England yearned to do, when war was so great a part of the business of life, and when the Black Prince was galloping in armor and in victory over the fields of Guienne. But it was a bad excursion the poet hit upon; he went when disaster attended the English forces; he was taken prisoner, and though ransomed shortly thereafter—as the record shows—it is uncertain when he returned; uncertain if he did not linger for years among the vineyards of France; maybe writing there his translation of the famous Roman de la Rose[42]—certainly loving this and other such, and growing by study of these Southern melodies into graces of his own, to overlap and adorn his Saxon sturdiness of speech.
There are recent continental critics[43] indeed, who claim him as French, and as finding not only his felicities of verse, but his impulse and his motives among the lilies of France. He does love these lilies of a surety; but I think he loves the English daisies better, and that it is with a thoroughly English spirit that he “powders” the meadows with their red and white, and sets among them the green blades of those island grasses, which flash upon his “morwenyngs of Maie.” To these times may possibly belong—if indeed Chaucer wrote it—“The Court of Love.” Into the discussion of its authenticity we do not enter; we run to cover under an ignorance which is more blissful than the wisdom that wearies itself with comparison of dates, with laws of prosody, with journeyman-like estimate of the tinklings of this or that spurt of rhyming habit. If Chaucer did not write it, we lift our hat to the unknown melodist—who can put the birds in choir—and pass on.
When our poet does reappear in London, it is not to tell any story of the war—of its hazards, or of its triumphs. Indeed, it is remarkable that this lissome poet, whose words like bangles shook out all tunes to his step, and who lived in the very heart of the days of Poitiers—when the doughty young Black Prince kindled a martial furor that was like the old crusade craze to follow Cœur de Lion to battle—remarkable, I say, that Chaucer, living on the high tide of war—living, too, in a court where he must have met Froissart, that pet of the Queen, who gloried in giving tongue to his enthusiasm about the deeds of knighthood—wonderful, I say, that Chaucer should not have brought into any of his tales or rhymes the din and the alarums and the seething passions of war. There are indeed glimpses of fluttering pennons and of spear thrusts; maybe, also, purple gouts of blood welling out from his page; but these all have the unreal look of the tourney, to which they mostly attach; he never scores martial scenes with a dagger. For all that Crécy or its smoking artillery had to do with his song, he might have sung a century earlier, or he might have sung a century later. Indeed, he does not seem to us a man of action, notwithstanding his court connection and his somewhile official place;—not even a man of loudly declared public policy, but always the absorbed, introspective, painstaking, quiet observer, to whom Nature in the gross, with its humanities now kindled by wanton appetites, and now lifted by reverence and love (with the everlasting broidery of flowers and trees and sunshine), was always alluring him from things accidental and of the time—though it were time of royal Philip’s ruin, or of a conquest of Aquitaine.
Yet withal, this Chaucer is in some sense a man of the world and courtier. The “Boke of the Duchesse” tells us this. And he can weave chaplets for those who have gone through the smoke of battles—though his own inclination may not lead him thither. To a date not very remote from that which belongs to the “Duchesse” must in all probability be assigned that other well-known minor poem of Chaucer’s, called the “Parlament of Foules.”[44] There are stories of his love-lornness in his young days, and of marriage delayed and of marriage made good—coming mostly from those who paint large pictures with few pigments—and which are exceeding hazy and indeterminate of outline: his “Troilus and Cresseide” make us know that he could go through the whole gamut of love, and fawning and teasing and conquest and forgetting, in lively earnest as well as fancy—if need were.
We have better data and surer ground to go upon when we come to score his official relations. We know that when not very far advanced in age (about 1370) he went to the continent on the King’s service; accomplishing it so well—presumably—that he is sent again, very shortly after, with a commission—his journey calling him to Genoa and Florence; Italy and the Mediterranean, then, probably for the first time, with all their glamour of old story, coming to his view. Some biographers make out, from chance lines in his after-poems, that he went over to Padua and saw Petrarch there, and learned of him some stories, which he afterward wrought into his garland of the Canterbury Tales. Possibly;[45] but it was not an easy journey over the mountains to Padua in those days, even if Petrarch had been domiciled there,—which is very doubtful; for the Italian poet, old and feeble, passed most of the latter years of his life at Arqua among the Euganean hills; and if Chaucer had met him, Petrarch would have been more apt to ask the man from far-away, murky England, about his country and King and the Prince Lionel (dead in those days), who only a few years before had married, at Milan, a daughter of the Visconti—than to bore him with a story at second hand (from Boccaccio) about the patient Griselda.
However this may be, it is agreed by nearly all commentators, that by reason of his southward journeyings and his after-familiarity with Italian literature (if indeed this familiarity were not of earlier date), that his own poetic outlook became greatly widened, and he fell away, in large degree, from his old imitative allegiance to the jingling measures of France, and that pretty
“Maze of to and fro,
Where light-heeled numbers laugh and go.”
Through all this time he is in receipt of favors from the Government—sometimes in the shape of direct pension—sometimes of an annual gift of wine—sometimes in moneys for payment of his costs of travel;—sometime, too, he has a money-getting place in the Customs.
John of Gaunt continues his stalwart friend. Indeed this Prince, late in life, and when he had come to the title of Duke of Lancaster, married, in third espousals, a certain Kate Swynford (née Roet), who, if much current tradition may be trusted, was a sister of Chaucer’s wife; it was, to be sure, looked upon by court people (for various reasons) as a match beneath the Duke; and Froissart tells us with a chirrupy air[46] of easy confidence (but there is no mention of the poet) that the peeresses of the court vowed they would have nothing to do with the new Duchess of Lancaster—by which it may be seen that fine ladies had then the same methods of punishing social audacities which they have now. The tradition has been given a new lease of life by the memorial window which under rule of Dean Stanley was set in Westminster Abbey;[47] and, however the truth may be, Chaucer’s life-long familiarity in the household of Lancaster is undoubted; and it is every way likely that about the knee of the poet may have frisked and played the little Hal. (b. 1367), who came afterward to be King Henry IV. It is to this monarch, newly come to the throne, that Chaucer addresses—in his latter days, and with excellent effect—that little piquant snatch of verse[48] about the lowness of his purse:
I am so sorrie now that ye be light,
For certes, but ye make me heavy cheere,
Me were as lief be laid upon my bere
For which unto your mercie thus I crie
Be heavie againe, or ellës mote I die.
Yet he seems never to lose his good humor or his sweet complacency; there is no carping; there is no swearing that is in earnest. His whole character we seem to see in that picture of him which his friend Occleve painted; a miniature, to be sure, and upon the cover of a MS. of Occleve’s poems; but it is the best portrait of him we have. Looking at it—though ’tis only half length—you would say he was what we call a dapper man; well-fed, for he loved always the good things of life—“not drinkless altogether, as I guess;” nor yet is it a bluff English face; no beefiness; regular features—almost feminine in fineness of contour—with light beard upon upper lip and chin; smooth cheeks; lips full (rosy red, they say, in the painting); eye that is keen,[49] and with a sparkle of humor in it; hands decorously kept; one holding a rosary, the other pointing—and pointing as men point who see what they point at, and make others see it too; his hood, which seems a part of his woollen dress, is picturesquely drawn about his head, revealing only a streak of hair over his temple; you see it is one who studies picturesqueness even in costume, and to the trimming of his beard into a forked shape;—no lint on his robe—you may be sure of that;—no carelessness anywhere: dainty, delicate, studious of effects, but with mirth and good nature shimmering over his face. Yet no vagueness or shakiness of purpose show their weak lines; and in his jaw there is a certain staying power that kept him firm and active and made him pile book upon book in the new, sweet English tongue, which out of the dialects of Essex and of the East of England he had compounded, ordered, and perfected, and made the pride of every man born to the inheritance of that Island speech.
And it is with such looks and such forces and such a constitutional cheeriness, that this blithe poet comes to the task of enchaining together his Canterbury Tales, with their shrewd trappings of Prologue—his best work, getting its last best touches after he is fairly turned of middle age, if indeed he were not already among the sixties. Is it not wonderful—the distinctness with which we see, after five hundred years have passed, those nine and twenty pilgrims setting out on the sweet April day, to travel down through the country highways and meadows of Kent!
The fields are all green, “y-powdered with daisies;” the birds are singing; the white blossoms are beginning to show upon the hedge-rows. And the Pilgrims, one and all, are so touched and colored by his shrewdness and aptness of epithet that we see them as plainly as if they had been cut out, figure by figure, from the very middle of that far-away century.
There goes the Knight—
And that a worthy man,
That from the timë that he first began
To ryden out, he lovéd chyvalrie
Trouth and honoúr, freedom and courtesie.
And after him his son, the Squire, the bright bachelor, who
Was as fresh as is the month of May;
Schort was his goune, with sleevës long and wide,
Well coude he sit on hors, and fairë ride.
He coudë songës make and wel endite,
Joust and eke dance, and wel portray and write.
Then there comes the charming Prioress—
Ycleped Madame Eglantine.
Ful well she sang the servicë divine,
Entunëd in hir nose ful semëly:
And Frensch she spak ful fair and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford attë Bowe,
For Frensch of Paris was to hir unknowe.
…
Full fetys was her cloke, as I was waar
Of smal coral aboute hir arme she baar
A paire of bedës gauded all with grene,
And thereon heng a broch of gold ful schene
On which was first y-writ a crownéd A,
And after—Amor Vincit Omnia!
Then comes the Monk, who has a shiny pate, who is stout, well fed, pretentious; his very trappings make a portrait—
And when he rood, men might his bridel heere
Gingling in a whistlyng wynd as cleere
And eek as loude as doth the chapel belle.
Again, there was a Friar—a wanton and a merry one—rollicksome, and loving rich houses only,
——who lispéd for his wantonnesse,
To make his Englissch swete upon his tunge;
His eyen twinkled in his hed aright
As do the starrës in the frosty night.
And among them all goes, with mincing step, the middle-aged, vulgar, well-preserved, coquettish, shrewish Wife of Bath:
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streyte y-tied, and schoos ful moiste and newe,
Bold was her face, and faire and reed of hewe.
And so—on, and yet on—for the twenty or more; all touched with those little, life-like strokes which only genius can command, and which keep the breath in those old Pilgrims to Canterbury, as if they travelled there, between the blooming hedge rows, on every sunshiny day of every succeeding spring.
I know that praise of these and of the way Chaucer marshals them at the Tabard, and starts them on their way, and makes them tell their stories, is like praise of June or of sunshine. All poets and all readers have spoken it ever since the morning they set out upon their journeyings; and many an American voyager of our day has found best illumination for that pleasant jaunt through County Kent toward the old towers of Canterbury in his recollections of Chaucer’s Pilgrims. It is true that the poet’s wayside marks are not close or strong; no more does a meteor leave other track than the memory of its brightness. We cannot fix of a surety upon the “ale-stake” where the Pardoner did “byten on a cake,” and there may be some doubt about the “litel” town
which that y-cleped is, Bob-up-and-Down.
But there is no doubt at all about the old Watling Road and Deptford, and the sight of Greenwich Heights, which must have shown a lifted forest away to their left; nor about Boughton Hill (by Boughton-under-Blean), with its far-off view of sea-water and of sails, and its nearer view of the great cathedral dominating Canterbury town. Up to the year 1874 the traveller might have found a Tabard[50] tavern in Southwark, which at about 1600 had replaced the old inn that Chaucer knew; but it repeated the old quaintness, and with its lumbering balconies and littered court and droll signs, and its saggings and slants and smells, carried one back delightfully to fourteenth-century times. And in Canterbury, at the end of the two or three days’[51] pilgrim journey, one can set foot in very earnest upon the pavement these people from the Tabard trod, under the cathedral arches—looking after the tomb of the great Black Prince, and the scene of the slaughter of Thomas à Becket. In that quaint old town, too, are gables under which some of these story-tellers of the Pilgrimage may have lodged; and (mingling old tales with new) there are latticed casements out of which Agnes Wickfield may have looked, and sidewalks where David Copperfield may have accommodated his boy-step to the lounging pace of the always imminent Micawber. Yet it is in the country outside and in scenes the poet loved best, that the aroma of the Canterbury Tales will be caught most surely; and it is among those picturesque undulations of land which lie a little westward of Harbledown—upon the Rochester road, which winds among patches of wood, and green stretches of grass and billowy hop-gardens, that the lover of Chaucer will have most distinctly in his ear the jingle of the “bridel” of the Monk, and in his eye the scarlet hosen and the wimple of the Wife of Bath.
Yet these Canterbury Tales convey something in them and about them beside delicacies; the host, who is master of ceremonies, throws mud at a grievous rate, and with a vigorous and a dirty hand. Boccaccio’s indecencies lose nothing of their quality in the smirched rhyme of the Reeve’s tale;[52] the Miller is not presentable in any decent company, and the Wife of Bath is vulgar and unseemly. There are others, to be sure, and enough, who have only gracious and grateful speech put into their mouths; and it is these we cherish. The stories, indeed, which these pilgrims tell, are not much in themselves; stolen, too, the most of them; stolen, just as Homer stole the current stories about Ajax and Ulysses; just as Boccaccio stole from the Gesta Romanorum; just as Shakespeare stole from the Cymric fables about King Lear and Cymbeline. He stole; but so did everyone who could get hold of a good manuscript. Imagine—if all books were in such form now, and MSS. as few and sparse as then, what a range for enterprising authors! But Chaucer stole nothing that he did not improve and make his own by the beauties he added.
Take that old slight legend (everywhere current in the north of England) of the little Christian boy, who was murdered by Jews, because he sang songs in honor of the Virgin; and who—after death—still sang, and so discovered his murderers. It is a bare rag of story, with only streaks of blood-red in it; yet how tenderly touched, and how pathetically told, in Chaucer’s tale of the Prioress!
It is a widow’s son—“sevene yeres of age”—and wheresoe’er he saw the image
Of Christe’s moder, had he in usage,
As him was taught, to knele adown and say
His Ave Marie! as he goth by the way.
Thus hath this widowe hire litel son y-taught
To worship aye, and he forgat it naughte.
And the “litel” fellow, with his quick ear, hears at school some day the Alma Redemptoris sung; and he asks what the beautiful song may mean? He says he will learn it before Christmas, that he may say it to his “moder dere.” His fellows help him word by word—line by line—till he gets it on his tongue:
From word to word, acording with the note,
Twiës a day, it passed thro’ his throte.
At last he has it trippingly; so—schoolward and homeward,
as he cam to and fro
Full merrily than would he sing and crie,
O Alma Redemptoris ever mó,
The sweetnesse hath his hertë perced so.
Through the Jews’ quarter he goes one day, singing this sweet song that bubbles from him as he walks; and they—set on by Satan, who “hath in Jewe’s herte his waspës nest”—conspire and plot, and lay hold on him, and cut his throat, and cast him into a pit.
But—a wonder—a miracle!—still from the bleeding throat, even when life is gone, comes the tender song, “O Alma Redemptoris!” And the wretched mother, wandering and wailing, is led by the sweet, plaintive echoes, whose tones she knows, to where her poor boy lies dead; and even as she comes, he, with throte y-carven, his
Alma Redemptoris gan to sing
So loude that al the placë gan to ring.
Then the Christian people take him up, and bear him away to the Abbey. His mother lies swooning by the bier. They hang those wicked Jews—and prepare the little body for burial and sprinkle it with holy water; but still from the poor bleeding throat comes “evermo’” the song:
O Alma Redemptoris mater!
And the good Abbot entreats him to say, why his soul lingers, with his throat thus all agape?
“My throte is cut unto my nekkë bone,”
Saidë this child, “and as by way of kynde,
I should have dyed, ye longë time agone,
But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookës finde,
Wol that his glory laste, and be in minde,
And for the worship of his moder dere,
Yet may I sing, ‘O Alma!’ loud and clere.”
But he says that as he received his death-blow, the Virgin came, and
“Methoughte she leyde a greyn upon my tongue,
Wherefore I singe and singe; I mote certeyn
Til from my tonge off-taken is the greyn;
And after that, thus saidë she to me,
‘My litel child, then wol I fecchen thee!’”
[Where at] This holy monk—this Abbot—him mene I,
His tonge out-caughte, and tok away the greyn,
And he gaf up the goost full softëly.
…
And when the Abbot had this wonder sein
His saltë teres trillëd adown as raine,
And graf he fell, all platt upon the grounde,
And stille he lay as he had been y-bounde.
After this they take away the boy-martyr from off his bier—
And in a tombe of marble stonës clere
Enclosen they his litel body swete;
Ther he is now: God leve us for to mete!
How tenderly the words all match to the delicate meaning! This delightful poet knows every finest resource of language: he subdues and trails after him all its harmonies. No grimalkin stretching out silken paws touches so lightly what he wants only to touch; no cat with sharpest claws clings so tenaciously to what he would grip with his earnester words. He is a painter whose technique is never at fault—whose art is an instinct.
Yet—it must be said—there is no grand horizon at the back of his pictures: pleasant May-mornings and green meadows a plenty; pathetic episodes, most beguiling tracery of incidents and of character, but never strong, passionate outbursts showing profound capacity for measurement of deepest emotion. We cannot think of him as telling with any adequate force the story of King Lear, in his delirium of wrath: Macbeth’s stride and hushed madness and bated breath could not come into the charming, mellifluous rhythm of Chaucer’s most tragic story without making a dissonance that would be screaming.
But his descriptions of all country things are garden-sweet. He touches the daisies and the roses with tints that keep them always in freshest, virgin, dewy bloom; and he fetches the forest to our eye with words that are brim-full of the odors of the woods and of the waving of green boughs.
In our next talk we shall speak of some who sang beside him, and of some who followed; but of these not one had so rare a language, and not one had so true an eye.