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: