| The day go’th fast, and after that com’th eve | |
| And yet came not to Troilus Criseyde. | |
| He looketh forth by hedge, by tree, by greve, | [grove |
| And far his head over the wall he laid ... | |
| “Have here my truth, I see her! Yond she is! | |
| Have up thine eyen, man! May’st thou not see?” | |
| Pandarus answered, “Nay, so mote I the! | |
| All wrong, by God! What say’st thou, man? Where art? | |
| That I see yond is but a farë-cart.” | |
| The warden of the gatës gan to call | |
| The folk which that without the gatës were, | |
| And bade them driven in their beastës all, | |
| Or all the night they musten bleven there; | [remain |
| And far within the night, with many a tear, | |
| This Troilus gan homeward for to ride, | |
| For well he seeth it helpeth nought t’ abide. |
And far within the night, while the “uncunning porters” sing over their liquor or snore on their pallets, Chaucer turns and returns the leaves of Virgil or Ovid, of Dante or the “Romance of the Rose.” Does he not also, to poor Philippa’s disgust, “laugh full fast” to himself sometimes over that witty and ungallant book of satires which contains “of wicked wives ... more legendës and lives than be of goodë wives in the Bible”? It is difficult to escape from this conviction. His “Wife of Bath” cites the treatises in question too fully and too well to make it probable that Chaucer wrote from mere memory. Remembering this probability, and the practical certainty that, like his contemporaries, Chaucer needed to read aloud for the full comprehension of what he had under his eyes, we shall then find nothing unexpected in his pretty plain allusions to reprisals. Sweet as honey in the mouth, his books proved sometimes bitter in the belly, like that of the Apocalypse. “Late to bed” suits ill with “early to rise,” and the poet hints pretty plainly that an imperious and somewhat unsympathetic “Awake, Geoffrey!” was often the first word he heard in the morning. When the Golden Eagle caught the sleeping poet up to heaven—
| At the last to me he spake | |
| In mannës voice, and said “Awake! | |
| And be not so aghast, for shame!” | |
| And called me then by my name | |
| And, for I should the better abraid | [rouse |
| Me dreamed, “Awake!” to me he said | |
| Right in the samë voice and steven | [tone |
| That useth one I couldë neven; | [name |
| And with that voice, sooth for to say’n | |
| My mindë came to me again; | |
| For it was goodly said to me, | |
| So it was never wont to be. | |
| “House of Fame,” ii., 47. |
CHAPTER IX
TOWN AND COUNTRY
| “For never to my mind was evening yet But was far beautifuller than its day.” Browning |
| “Wherefore is the sun red at even? For he goeth toward hell.” (“The Master of Oxford’s Catechism” (XV. cent.); “Reliquiæ Antiquæ,” i., 232.) |
That which in Chaucer’s day passed for rank “sluggardy a-night” might yet be very early rising by the modern standard; and our poet, sorely as he needed Philippa’s shrill alarum, might still have deserved the character given to Turner by one who knew his ways well, “that he had seen the sun rise oftener than all the rest of the Academy put together.” It is indeed startling to note how sunrise and sunset have changed places in these five hundred years. When a modern artist waxes poetical about the sunrise, a lady will frankly assure him that it is the saddest sight she has ever seen; to her it spells lassitude and reaction after a long night’s dancing. Chaucer and his contemporaries lived more in Turner’s mood: “the sun, my dear, that’s God!” In the days when a tallow candle cost four times its weight in beefsteak, when wax was mainly reserved for God and His saints, and when you could only warm your hands at the risk of burning your boots and blearing your eyes, then no man could forget his strict dependence on the King of the East. The poets of the Middle Ages seem to have been, in general, as insensible to the melancholy beauties of sunset as to those of autumn. Leslie Stephen, in the first chapters of his “Playground of Europe,” has brought a wealth of illustration and penetrating comment to show how strictly men’s ideas of the picturesque are limited by their feelings of comfort; and the medieval mind was even more narrowly confined within its theological limitations. Popular religion was then too often frankly dualistic; to many men, the Devil was a more insistent reality than God; and none doubted that the former had special power over the wilder side of nature. The night, the mountain, and the forest were notoriously haunted; and, though many of the finest monasteries were built in the wildest scenery, this was prompted not by love of nature but by the spirit of mortification. At Sülte, for instance, in the forest of Hildesheim, the blessed Godehard built his monastery beside a well of brackish water, haunted by a demon, “who oft-times affrighted men, women and maidens, by catching them up with him into the air.” The sainted Bishop exorcised not only the demon but the salts, so that “many brewers brew therefrom most excellent beer ... wherefore the Bürgermeister and Councillors grant yearly to our convent a hundred measures of Michaelmas malt, three of which measures are equal in quantity to a herring-barrel.” What appealed to the founders of the Chartreuse or Tintern was not the beauty of “these steep woods and lofty cliffs,” but their ascetic solitude. When, by the monks’ own labours and those of their servants, the fields had become fertile, so that they now found leisure to listen how “the shady valley re-echoes in Spring with the sweet songs of birds,” then they felt their forefathers to have been right in “noting fertile and pleasant places as a hindrance to stronger minds.”[118] After all, the earth was cursed for Adam’s sake, and even its apparent beauty was that of an apple of Sodom. That which Walther von der Vogelweide sang in his repentant old age had long been a commonplace with moralists—