The noise of foules for to ben delivered
So loude rong, "have doon and let us wende!"
In giving their verdicts the Goose is remote from sentiment, saying to the unsuccessful wooer,
But she wol love him, lat him love another!
The turtle-dove blushes, and gives her word for immortal hopeless love. The poem, in the seven line stanza, ends with a rondel, confessedly translated from the French, and the poet wakens from his dream and returns to his dear books, on the look-out for new material. He has shown his mastery of style, and his knowledge, but he has not yet "come to his kingdom".
Troilus and Criseyde.
Not to linger over other minor pieces, we may say that, in "Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer does come to his kingdom, and proves himself a Master, granting the taste and conditions of his age, while, in many beautiful passages, he attains to what is good for universal taste, to what is universally human.
The subject is an episode in the mediaeval legend of the Siege of Troy, as it was embellished on the lines of the pseudo-Dares and the pseudo-Dictys, by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, then by Guido de Colonna, and then by Boccaccio in the "Filostrato". The last gives Chaucer his starting-point; out of 8239 lines, 2583 are reckoned to be translated from Boccaccio, while there are borrowings from Petrarch, and much moralizing is rendered out of the prose of Boëthius, whom King Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon, and Chaucer into the prose of his own time. Chaucer uses his materials as he pleases, greatly expanding, transposing, and omitting. Almost all his own is the character of Pandarus, who, in Homer, is merely notable for having broken a solemn truce by wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Boccaccio made him a young cousin of Criseyde, who, in the mediaeval legend, stays shamefaced in Troy, while her father, Calchas, deserts to the Greeks. Troilus, scarcely mentioned by Homer, is the brother, and in battle almost the equal of Hector. Troilus, though he had scoffed at love, is smitten by the eyes of Criseyde, and is on the point of dying without avowing his passion, when Pandarus, whom Chaucer makes the uncle of Criseyde, acts vigorously as go-between, and saves the life of Troilus by bringing the pair together. Pandarus is a good-natured but the reverse of a scrupulously delicate friend and uncle. Nevertheless, a conscience he has, in his way, and lectures Troilus at length on the infamy of men who boast of their victories in love, and of men who play his own part from any lower motive than kindness and pity.
For thee am I becomen,
Betwixen game and ernest, swich a mene
As maken wommen unto men to comen:
Al sey I nought, thou wost wel what I mene.
Pandarus has a conscience, to this extent, and it is to be presumed that he did not go beyond the mediaeval idea of what a gentleman might do to help a friend in love. Yet "he will be mocking," and his conduct is as remote from our ideas of honour, as from those of the heroic Greeks and Trojans themselves. Shakespeare has debased the Pandarus of Chaucer in his treatment of the same character in "Troilus and Cressida".
Criseyde herself, granting the ideas of Chaucer's time about love, is an honourable and most winning lady, the soul of honour (she wears widow's weeds for her father's shame), but she has not the faintest idea of marrying her lover.