Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce,
For she coude of that art the olde daunce.'
She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands because she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical woman. Bold indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her part. The Wife is no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she is well filled out with her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as we would watch a neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and costly one, bought at Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands whom she has badgered into getting it.
Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to observe him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which is, that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in story-telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art in portrait painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the dark ages; blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one another. In painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new power found expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was dead, and in the careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his Wife,' is the observant spirit of the Canterbury Tales. That woman standing there in her miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon her head, her hand laid in her husband's, and her eyes regarding his pious, solemn gesture as if she had consented in her own mind to see him painted as he wished, and not betray her sense of humour, the man, the pattens on the floor, the little dog, and the detailed chandelier, are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The identity of them is the amazing thing; their difference from all the other men and women of the town, the difference of their room from all other rooms, and their little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that married couple with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over breasts, on a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the mediæval, and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir Segwarides.
Prose and verse.
After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in prose. Scott, indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his first tales in verse, but the rhyming story-teller disappeared in the greater author of the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer himself is interesting for marking the transition. He had many attributes of later narrative, in his round English humour, in his concern with actual life, although in this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of the portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art. But while his verse in the Canterbury Tales has the effect of good prose, his prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his governance. He expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he was only nine years old, there had been written in Italy prose tales that have hardly been excelled as examples of the two forms of the short story. Chaucer was born in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the Decameron.
Boccaccio.
Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's, and a more elaborate life. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly seem to have contributed to his character. He spent six years of his youth apprenticed to a merchant in Paris, forsook business, and was sent to learn law, and only in the end persuaded his father to let him devote himself to books. He had a knowledge of the world uncommon even in his day, and a knowledge of letters that was rare. He was something of a scholar, something of a courtier, and, particularly, something of a poet. Sentence after sentence in the Decameron glides by like a splash of sunlight on a stream with floating blossoms. I must quote one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful translation:—
'By a clear well, within a little field
Full of green grass and flowers of every hue,