This homely, whimsical point of view shows itself in a thousand minute touches. Friar John, in the Somnours Tale, goes to call on friend Thomas:—
And fro the bench he droof awey the cat,
And leyde adoun his potente[128] and his hat,
And eek his scrippe, and sette him softe adoun....
The rout pursues dan Russel the fox:—
And cryden, “Out! harrow! and weylawey!
Ha, ha, the fox!” and after him they ran,
And eek with staves many another man;
Ran Colle our dogge, and Talbot, and Gerland,
And Malkin, with a distaf in her hand;
Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges
So were they fered for berking of the dogges
And shouting of the men and wimmen eek,
They ronne so, hem thoughte hir herte brekke.
They yelleden as feendes doon in hellë;
The dokes[129] cryden as men wolde hem quelle;[130]
The gees for fere flowen[131] over the trees;
Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees....
There is nothing wildly farcical in any of this. Friar John does not sit on the cat; the men and dogs do not tumble over each other. The humour consists in the point of view which finds such incidents worth recording. It is not what he says, but the way he says it; not what he sees, but the way he sees it.
As to the sympathetic quality of humour, that is even more obvious in all Chaucer’s work. It is sympathy that lies at the bottom of a tolerance so wide that it hardly finds it necessary to forgive. When Chaucer needs a melodramatic villain or villainess such as Apius, or Alle’s mother, he can depict one, but except when it affords opportunity for comedy he usually touches an evil character but lightly. His heart lies in the pure poetry of such women as Constance and Dorigen, or in broadly comic effect: he has no desire to sound the depths of human nature or to dwell upon the darker and more terrible side of life. Shakespeare’s comedy is often touched with a suggestion of something faintly tragic. Even Falstaff is by no means a wholly comic figure, and the wisdom of Jaques, with all its affectation, contains a truth that goes beneath the surface. Chaucer seldom shows us the revealing power of comedy, but, like Shakespeare, he is not afraid to blend gaiety and gravity in the same person. From one point of view the Book of the Duchesse is surely the most cheerful elegy ever written. Chaucer does not tell off certain low-class characters for comic effect, he allows even the noblest and best a sense of humour. When we think of the serious and lachrymose heroines of romance, we feel that Chaucer’s women owe half their vitality to the fact that they are not afraid to laugh, that noble and high-minded as they are, they are part and parcel of the ordinary stuff of human life.
CHAPTER VI
CHAUCER’S DESCRIPTIVE POWER