Pictures like these, in their directness and simplicity, show more loving nature-knowledge than pages of word-painting; and, if they are not only essentially decorative but even somewhat conventional, those are qualities almost inseparable from the art of the time. It is less strange that Chaucer’s sunrises should bear a certain resemblance to other sunrises, than that his men and women should be so strikingly individual. Yet, even so, compare two or three of his sunrises together, and see how great is their variety in uniformity. Take, for instance, “Canterbury Tales,” A., 1491, 2209, and F., 360; or, again, A., 1033 and “Book of Duchess,” 291, where Chaucer describes nature and art in one breath, and each heightens the effect of the other. With all his love of palaces and walled gardens, though he revels in feudal magnificence and glow of colour and elaboration of form, he is already thoroughly modern in his love of common things.[127] Here he has no equal until Wordsworth; it has been truly remarked that he is one of the few poets whom Wordsworth constantly studied, and one of the very few to whom he felt and confessed inferiority. Chaucer’s triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun’s Priest’s tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with Chanticleer—all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how glorious a part of God’s creation is even a barn-door cock?
| His voice was merrier than the merry orgon On massë-days that in the churchë go’n ... His comb was redder than the fine coral, Embattled as it were a castle wall; His bill was black, and like the jet it shone, Like azure were his leggës and his toen; His nailës whiter than the lily flower, And like the burnished gold was his colour! |
Nothing but Chaucer’s directness of observation and truth of colouring could have kept his work as fresh as it is. Like Memling and the Van Eycks, he has all the reverence of the centuries with all the gloss of youth. The peculiar charm of medieval art is its youthfulness and freshness; and no poet is richer in those qualities than he.
In this, of course, he reflects his environment. Although London was already becoming in a manner cockneyfied; although she already imported sea-coal from Newcastle, and her purveyors scoured half England for food, and her cattle sometimes came from as far as Nottingham, and most of her bread was baked at Stratford, yet she still bore many traces of the ruralism which so astonishes the modern student in medieval city life. Even towns like Oxford and Cambridge were rather collections of agriculturalists co-operating for trade and protection than a conglomeration of citizens in the modern sense; and the University Long Vacation is a survival from the days when students helped in the hay and corn harvests. And, greatly as London was already congested in comparison with other English cities, there was as yet no real divorce between town and country. Her population of about 40,000 was nearly four times as great as that of any other city in the kingdom; but, even in the most crowded quarters, the mass of buildings was not yet sufficient to disguise the natural features of the site. The streets mounted visibly from the river and Fleet Brook to the centre of the city. St. Paul’s was plainly set on a hill, and nobody could fail to see the slope from the village of Holborn down the present Gray’s Inn Lane, up which (it has lately been argued) Boadicea’s chariot once led the charge against the Roman legions. Thames, though even the medieval palate found its water drinkable only “in parts,” still ran at low tide over native shingle and mud; the Southwark shore was green with trees; not only monasteries but often private houses had their gardens, and surviving records mention fruit trees as a matter of course.[128] Outside, there was just a sprinkling of houses for a hundred yards or so beyond each gate, and then an ordinary English rural landscape, rather wild and wooded, indeed, for modern England, but dotted with villages and church towers. Knightsbridge, in those days, was a distant suburb to which most of the slaughter-houses were banished; and the districts of St. James and St. Giles, so different in their later social conditions, both sprang up round leper hospitals in open country. Fitzstephen, writing in the days of Henry II., describes Westminster as two miles from the walls, “but yet conjoined with a continuous suburb. On all sides,” he continues, “without the houses of the suburb, are the citizens’ gardens and orchards, planted with trees, both large, sightly, and adjoining together. On the north side are pastures and plain meadows, with brooks running through them turning watermills with a pleasant noise. Not far off is a great forest, a well-wooded chase, having good covert for harts, bucks, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not of a hungry sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding plentiful increase and filling the barns with corn. There are near London, on the north side, especial wells in the suburbs, sweet, wholesome, and clear. Amongst which Holy Well, Clerkenwell, and St. Clement’s Well are most famous, and most frequented by scholars and youths of the city in summer evenings, when they walk forth to take the air.” No doubt in Chaucer’s time the suburbs had grown a little, but not much; it is doubtful whether the population of England was greater in 1400 than in 1200 A.D. Eastward from his Aldgate lodgings the eye stretched over the woody flats bordering the Thames. Northwards, beyond the Bishop’s Wood in Stepney parish and the fen which stretched up the Lea valley to Tottenham, rose the “Great Forest” of Epping. In a more westerly direction Chaucer might have seen a corner of the moor which gave its name to one of the London gates, and which too often became a dreary swamp for lack of drainage; and, above and beyond, the heaths of Highgate and Hampstead. Riley’s “Memorials” contain frequent mention of gardens outside the gates; it was one of these, “a little herber[129] that I have,” in which Chaucer laid the scene of his “Legend of Good Women.” These gardens seem to have made a fairly continuous circle round the walls. The richest were towards the west, and made an unbroken strip of embroidery from Ludgate to Westminster. Nearer home, however, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Saffron Hill, and Vine Street, Holborn, carry us back to the Earl of Lincoln’s twenty carefully-tilled acres of herbs, roses, and orchard-land, or to the still more elaborate paradise belonging to the Bishop and monks of Ely, whose vineyard and rosary and fields of saffron-crocus stretched down the slopes of that pleasant little Old-bourn which trickled into Fleet Brook. Holborn was then simply the nearest and most suburban of a constellation of villages which clustered round the great city; and, if the reader would picture to himself the open country beyond, let him take for his text that sentence in which Becket’s chaplain enumerates the rights of chase enjoyed by the city. “Many citizens,” writes Fitzstephen, “do delight themselves in hawks and hounds; for they have liberty of hunting in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, all Chiltern, and in Kent to the water of Cray.” The city huntsman was, in those days, a salaried official of some dignity.
So Chaucer, who had at one gate of his house the great city, was on the other side free of such green English fields and lanes as have inspired a company of nature-poets unsurpassed in any language. May we not hope that his companions in the “little herber,” or on his wider excursions, were sometimes “the moral Gower” or “the philosophical Strode?” And may we not picture them dining in some country inn, like Izaak Walton and his contemplative fellow-citizens? Chaucer’s friend was probably the Ralph Strode of Merton College, a distinguished philosopher and anti-Wycliffite controversialist; and it is noteworthy that a Ralph Strode was also a lawyer and Common Serjeant to the city, where he frequently acted as public prosecutor, and that he received for his services a grant of the house over Aldersgate in the year after Chaucer had entered into Aldgate.[130] There is no obvious reason to dissociate the city lawyer from the Oxford scholar, who has also been suggested with some probability as the author of “Pearl” and other 14th-century poems second only to Chaucer’s. However that may be, “the philosophical Strode” must unquestionably have influenced the poet who dedicated to him his “Troilus,” and we may read an echo of their converse in Chaucer’s own reflections at the end of that poem on Love and Thereafter—
| O youngë freshë folkës, he or she, In which that love upgroweth with your age, Repair ye home from worldly vanitie, And of your heart upcast ye the visage To that same God that after His image You made; and think that all is but a fair, This world, that passeth soon as flowers fair. |
But we are wandering, perhaps, too far into the realm of mere suppositions. With or without philosophical converse in the fields, the long day wanes at last; and now—
| When that the sun out of the south ’gan west And that this flower ’gan close, and go to rest, For darkness of the night, the which she dread, Home to mine house full swiftly I me sped To go to rest, and early for to rise. |
The curfew is ringing again from Bow Steeple; the throng of citizens grows thicker as they near the gates; inside, the street echoes still with the laughter of apprentices and maids, while sounds of still more uproarious revelry come from the wide tavern doors. Soon, however, in half an hour or so, the streets will be empty; the drinkers will huddle with closed doors round the embers in the hall; and our poet, as he lays his head on the pillow, may well repeat to himself those words of Fitzstephen, which he must surely have read: “The only pests of London are the immoderate drinking of fools, and the frequency of fires.”