well, even Age has its consolations—

The flour is gone, there is no more to tell,
The bran, as I best can, now must I sell!

There we have, in a couple of lines, the philosophy of Chaucer’s later years—to take life as we find it, and make the best of it. If he had cared to take up the full burden of his time, there were plenty of themes for tragedy. The world seemed to grow madder and madder as the 14th century drew to its close; Edward III.’s sun had gone down in disgrace; his grandson’s brilliant infancy had passed into a childish manhood, whose wayward extravagances ended only too naturally in the tragedy of Pontefract; the Emperor Wenceslas was a shameless drunkard, and Charles VI. of France a raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy, even to his own supporters.[75] The Great Pestilence and the Papal Schism, the Jacquerie in France, and the Peasants’ Revolt in England, had shaken society to its foundations; but Chaucer let all these things go by with scarcely more than a shrug of his shoulders.

To the contemporary authors of Piers Plowman, and in a less degree to John Gower, the world of that time was Vanity Fair in Bunyan’s sense; a place of constant struggle and danger, in which every honest pilgrim marches with his back to the flames of the City of Destruction, marks their lurid glare on the faces of the crowd, and sees the slightest gesture magnified into shadows that reach to the very stars. To Chaucer the poet it was rather Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: a place where the greatest problems of life may be brought up for a moment, but can only be dismissed as insoluble; where humanity is far less interesting than the separate human beings which compose it; where we eat with them, talk with them, laugh and weep with them, yet play with them all the while in our own mind; so that, when at last it draws towards sunset, we have no more to say than “come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played out.” But behind and beneath Chaucer the poet was Chaucer the man, whose last cry is recorded at the end of the “Canterbury Tales.” Everything points to a failure of his health for some months at any rate before his death. The monks of Westminster were no doubt often at his bedside; and, though he had evidently drifted some way from his early creed, we must beware of exaggerations on this point.[76] Moreover, even if his unorthodoxy had been far greater than we have any reason to believe, it needed a temper very different from Chaucer’s to withstand, under medieval conditions, the terrors of the Unknown and the constant visitations of the clergy. Indeed, it seems superfluous to offer any explanation or apology for a document which is, on its face, as true a cry of the heart as the dying man’s instinctive call for his mother. “I beseech you meekly of God” (so runs the epilogue to the “Parson’s Tale”) “that ye pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts—and namely [especially] of my translations and enditings of worldly vanities.... And many a song and many a lecherous lay, that Christ for His great mercy forgive me the sin ... and grant me grace of very penitence, confession and satisfaction to do in this present life, through the benign grace of Him that is King of Kings and Priest over all Priests, that bought us with the precious blood of His heart; so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that shall be saved.”

But we are anticipating. The generosity of Henry IV., as we have seen, had brought Chaucer once again into easy circumstances, and within a few weeks we find him leasing from the Westminster Abbey “a tenement, with its appurtenances, situate in the garden of St. Mary’s Chapel,” i.e. somewhere on the site of the present Henry VII.’s chapel, sheltered by the south-eastern walls of the Abbey church, and “nigh to the White Rose Tavern”; for in those days the Westminster precincts contained houses of the most miscellaneous description, which all enjoyed the privilege of sanctuary. Near this spot, in 1262, Henry III. had ordered pear trees to be planted “in the herbary between the King’s Chamber and the Church.”[77] “He that plants pears, plants for his heirs,” says the old proverb; and it is pleasant to believe that Chaucer enjoyed at least the blossom of this ancient orchard, if not its fruit. He took the house at a rent of four marks for as many of the next fifty-three years as his life might last; but he was not fated to enjoy it for so many weeks. In February, 1400, he drew an instalment of one of his pensions; in June another instalment was paid through the hands of one William Somere; and then the Royal accounts record no more. He died on October 25, according to the inscription on his tomb, the first literary monument in that part of the Abbey which has since received the name of Poet’s Corner.[78] It is probable that we owe this fortunate circumstance still more to the fact that Chaucer was an Abbey tenant than to his distinction as courtier or poet. When Gower died, eight years later, his body was laid just as naturally among the Austin Canons of Southwark with whom he had spent his last years.

[Larger Image]

WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY

(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)
(THE TWO-GABLED HOUSE JUST BELOW HENRY VII'S CHAPEL (E) MIGHT POSSIBLY BE CHAUCER'S ACTUAL DWELLING)