And, again, the reflections which he adds upon the death of Arcite, without the least authority from the original of Boccaccio—
| His spirit changèd house, and wentë there, | |
| As I came never, I can not tell where: | |
| Therefore I stint, I am no divinister; | [stop |
| Of soulës find I not in this register, | |
| Nor list me those opinions to tell | |
| Of them, though that they writen where they dwell. |
It is difficult to believe that the man who gratuitously recorded those two personal impressions, without the least excuse of artistic necessity, was a perfectly orthodox Catholic. It is more than possible that he would not have accepted in cold blood all the consequences of his words; but we may see plainly in him that sceptical, mocking spirit to which the contemporary Sacchetti constantly addresses himself in his sermons. This was indeed one of the most obvious results of the growing unpopularity of the hierarchy, intensified by the shock of the Black Death. That great crisis had specially stimulated the two religious extremes. Churches grew rapidly in size and in splendour of furniture, while great lords built themselves oratories from which they could hear Mass without getting out of bed. The Pope decreed a new service for a new Saint’s Day, “full of mysteries, stuffed with indulgences,” at a time when even reasonable men began to complain that the world had too many. Richard II. presented his Holiness with an elaborate “Book of the Miracles of Edward late King of England”—that is, of the weak and vicious Edward II., whose attempted canonization was as much a political job as those of Lancaster and Arundel, Scrope and Henry VI.; and this popular canonization ran so wild that men feared lest the crowd of new saintlings should throw Christ and His Apostles into the shade. On the other side there was the “new theology,” which had grown up, with however little justification, from the impulse given by orthodox and enthusiastic friars—pantheistic doctrines, minimizing the reality of sin; denials of eternal punishment; attempts to find a heaven for good pagans and Jews.[291] Even in the 13th century, willingly or unwillingly, the friars had raised similar questions; a Minister-General had been scandalized to hear them debating in their schools “whether God existed”; and Berthold of Ratisbon had felt bound to warn his hearers against the subtle sophism that souls, when once they have been thoroughly calcined, must reach a point at which anything short of hell-fire would feel uncomfortably chilly. This is the state of mind into which Chaucer, like so many of his contemporaries, seems to have drifted. He had no reasoned antagonism to the Church dogmas as a whole; on the contrary, he was keenly sensible to the beauty of much that was taught. But the humourist in him was no less tickled by many popular absurdities; and he had enough philosophy to enjoy the eternal dispute between free-will and predestination. As a boy, he had knelt unthinkingly; as a broken old man, he was equally ready to bow again before Eternal Omnipotence, and to weep bitterly for his sins. But, in his years of ripe experience and prosperity and conscious intellectual power, we must think of him neither among the devout haunters of shrines and sanctuaries nor among those who sat more austerely at the feet of Wycliffe’s Poor Priests; rather among the rich and powerful folk who scandalized both Catholics and Lollards by taking God’s name in vain among their cups, and whetting their worldly wit on sacred mysteries. We get glimpses of this in many quarters—in the “Roman de la Rose,” for instance, but still more in Sacchetti’s sermons and the poem of “Piers Plowman.” Here the poet complains, after speaking of the “gluttony and great oaths” that were then fashionable—
| “But if they carpen of Christ, these clerks and these layfolk | [discuss |
| At the meat in their mirth, when minstrels be still, | |
| Then tell they of the Trinity a tale or twain | |
| And bringen forth a bald reason, and take Bernard to witness, | |
| And put forth a presumption to prove the sooth. | |
| Thus they drivel at their dais the Deity to know, | |
| And gnawen God with the gorge when the gut is full ... | |
| I have heard high men eating at the table | |
| Carpen, as they clerkës were, of Christ and His might | |
| And laid faults upon the Father that formed us all, | |
| And carpen against clerkës crabbed words:— | |
| ‘Why would our Saviour suffer such a worm in His bliss | |
| That beguiled the Woman and the Man after, | |
| Through which wiles and words they wenten to hell, | |
| And all their seed for their sin the same death suffered? | |
| Here lieth your lore,’ these lords ’gin dispute. | |
| ‘Of that ye clerks us kenneth of Christ by the Gospel ... | [teach |
| Why should we, that now be, for the works of Adam | |
| Rot and be rent? reason would it never ...’ | |
| Such motives they move, these masters in their glory, | |
| And maken men to misbelieve that muse much on their words.”[292] |
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
VIEW FROM NEAR CHAUCER’S TOMB
More unorthodox still were those whom Walsingham would have made partly responsible for the horrors of the Peasants’ Revolt. “Some traced the cause of these evils to the sins of the great folk, whose faith in God was feigned; for some of them (it is said) believed that there was no God, no sacrament of the altar, no resurrection from the dead, but that as a beast dies so also there is an end of man.”
There is, of course, no such dogmatic infidelity in Chaucer. Even if he had felt it, he was too wise to put it in writing; as Professor Lounsbury justly says of the two passages quoted above, “the wonder is not that they are found so infrequently, but that they are found at all.” Yet there was also in Chaucer a true vein of religious seriousness. “Troilus and Criseyde” was written not long before the “Legend of Good Women”; and as at the outset of the later poem he goes out of his way to scoff, so at the end of the “Troilus” he is at equal pains to make a profession of faith. The last stanza of all, with its invocation to the Trinity and to the Virgin Mary, might be merely conventional; medieval literature can show similar sentiments in very strange contexts, and part of this very stanza is translated from Dante. But however Chaucer may have loved to let his wit play about sacred subjects “at meat in his mirth when minstrels were still,” we can scarcely fail to recognize another side to his mind when we come to the end of those “Troilus” stanzas which are due merely to Boccaccio, and begin upon the translator’s own epilogue—
| O youngë freshë folkës, he or she In which ay love up-groweth with your age, Repair ye home from worldly vanitee ... |
“Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played out.” But, though we have nothing of the reformer in our composition; though we are for the most part only too frankly content to take the world as we find it; though, even in their faith, our fellow-Christians make us murmur, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” though we most love to write of Vanity Fair, yet at the bottom of our heart we do desire a better country, and confess sometimes with our mouth that we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.