That slepen all the night with open eye,
So nature pricketh them in their courages.
Even Shakspeare, who comes after everybody has done his best and seems to say, “Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not mend that. With Chaucer, the sun seems never to have run that other half of his course in the Ram, but to have stood still there and made one long spring-day of his life.
Chaucer was probably born in 1328, seven years after the death of Dante, and he certainly died in 1400, having lived consequently seventy-two years. Of his family we know nothing. He was educated either at Oxford or Cambridge, or at neither of these famous universities. He was, perhaps, a student at the Inner Temple, on the books of which a certain phantasmagoric Mr. Buckley had read a record that “Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet street.”
In the thirty-ninth year of his age he received from Edward III a pension of twenty marks (equal to $1000 now), and afterwards a grant of a pitcher of wine daily, and the custody of a ward which gave £104 a year, and two places in the customs. In the last year of Edward III he was one of three envoys sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the Prince of Wales and a daughter of the French King. Richard II confirmed his pension of twenty marks, and granted him another of like amount instead of the daily wine.
Chaucer married Philippa Pycard or De la Roet, sister of Katherine Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt. By this connection he is supposed to have become a favorer of Wycliffe’s doctrines, and was in some way concerned in the insurrection of John of Northampton, which seems to have had for its object some religious reform. He was forced to fly into Holland, and is said to have made his peace at last by betraying his companions. I think one’s historical comfort is not disturbed by refusing to credit this story, especially as it stains the fame of a great poet, and, if character may ever be judged from writings, a good man. We may grant that he broke the Franciscan friar’s head in Fleet street, if it were only for the alliteration, but let us doubt that he ever broke his faith. It is very doubtful whether he was such stuff as martyrs are made of. Plump men, though nature would seem to have marked them as more combustible, seldom go to the stake, but rather your lean fellows, who can feel a fine satisfaction in not burning well to spite the Philistines.
At this period of his life Chaucer is thought to have been in straitened circumstances, but a new pension and a yearly pipe of wine were granted him by Richard II, and on the accession of Henry IV these were confirmed, with a further pension of forty marks. These he only lived a year to enjoy, dying October 25, 1400.
The most poetical event in Chaucer’s life the critics have, of course, endeavored to take away from us. This is his meeting with Petrarch, to which he alludes in the prologue to the Clerk’s “Tale of Griseldis.” There is no reason for doubting this that I am able to discover, except that it is so pleasing to think of, and that Chaucer affirms it. Chaucer’s embassy to Italy was in 1373, the last year of Petrarch’s life, and it was in this very year that Petrarch first read the “Decameron.” In his letter to Boccaccio he says: “The touching story of Griseldis has been ever since laid up in my memory that I may relate it in my conversations with my friends.” We are forced to believe so many things that ought never to have happened that the heart ought to be allowed to recompense itself by receiving as fact, without too close a scrutiny of the evidence, whatever deserved to take place so truly as this did. Reckoning back, then, by the finer astronomy of our poetic instinct, we find that a conjunction of these two stars of song did undoubtedly occur in that far-off heaven of the Past.
On the whole, we may consider the life of Chaucer as one of the happiest, and also the most fortunate, that ever fell to the lot of poets. In the course of it he must have been brought into relation with all ranks of men. He had been a student of books, of manners, and of countries. In his description of the Clerk of Oxford, in which there is good ground for thinking that he alludes to some of his own characteristics, he says:
For him was liefer have at his bed’s head