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