Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

That pitee renneth sone in gentil heart.

It is a pretty picture which shows the king’s daughter gently bandaging the wounded bird upon her lap, or doing “hir bisiness and al hir might” to gather herbs for salves.

Constance, Griselda, Dorigen are maturer and more developed. They are women, not girls, and women who have lived and suffered, but they are just what we should expect Blanche, or Emily, or Canace to develop into. They have less gaiety and light-heartedness, less pretty wilfulness than these younger sisters of theirs, but they have the same frankness and directness, the same honesty of mind. They meet their fate with grave serenity and simple courage. Griselda abandons herself to what she believes to be her duty. Constance and Dorigen when confronted by danger show perfect readiness to do what in them lies to defend their own honour. Constance throws the wicked steward into the sea; Dorigen, instead of indulging in hysterics, is quick-witted enough to hit on a way of escape which no natural means could have blocked. Through all three stories runs a vein of tenderness which stirs our sympathy. Griselda, who has borne so much in patience, gives vent to one passionate cry of reproach when she is bidden to make way for the new wife, a cry which has in it all a woman’s fond clinging to the memory of a past happiness:—

O gode god! how gentil and how kinde
Ye semed by your speche and your visage
The day that maked was our mariage;

and surely no direct accusation of cruelty could show with equal clearness how deeply she has suffered. They are great-hearted women, before whose innate nobility the persecutions and unjust accusations to which they are subjected drop into nothingness.

When Chaucer deliberately sets out to draw a saint instead of a woman, he is less successful. Our sympathies are with Blanche, as she sings and dances so gaily, rather than with the preternaturally pious Virginia, who at the age of twelve often feigns sickness in order to

... fleen the companye
Wher lykly was to treten of folye,[107]
As is at festes, revels, and at daunces ...

Indeed the whole of the Phisiciens Tale seems curiously cold and lifeless. There is a touch of nature at the end where the child, forgetting her piety, flings her arms round her father’s neck, and asks if there is no remedy, and again where she begs him to smite softly, but these are not enough to atone for the perfunctoriness of the rest. The story is too essentially tragic for the barest narration of it not to make some appeal to us, but it is impossible not to feel that Chaucer was either hurried or working against the grain when he wrote his version.

The Seconde Nonnes Tale contains even less of human interest. Cecilia is neither more nor less than the mouthpiece of the Christian religion, and the miracles that she works and the sermons that she preaches leave the reader unmoved. The music of the verse has a charm of its own, and Chaucer’s most left-handed work is yet the work of a genius, but a comparison of Cecilia with Constance soon shows the difference between a real woman and an embodied ideal. The miraculous element, which is subordinated to the human interest in the Man of Lawes Tale, dominates the whole of the Seconde Nonnes Tale, and the inevitable sameness of the various conversions further detracts from its vividness.

In Cressida Chaucer had painted a woman of the butterfly type. In the Canterbury Tales he gives us a certain number of actually immoral women, such as Alisoun and May, but he paints no second picture of pretty helpless coquettishness. The heroines of the less savoury tales are coarser in fibre and for the most part lower in the social scale than Calkas’ daughter, and their stories are of mere sensuous self-indulgence with none of the charm and poetry which marks the tale of Troilus and Cressida. One character alone recalls Chaucer’s earlier heroine. The Prioress is very much what a fourteenth-century Cressida would have been if her friends had placed her in a convent instead of finding her a husband. She has the same daintiness and trimness, the same superficial tender-heartedness. It is difficult to imagine that her sympathy, like Canace’s, would take the practical form of applying salves or binding up wounds, but:—