“Unto this day it doth mine hertë boote,
That I have had my world as in my time!”
The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving regret of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of him which we make from his works. It is, I think, more engaging than that of any other poet. The downcast eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the broad brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet with an inexpugnable youth shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all noticeable, and not less so their harmony of placid tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smoothness of the face as of one who thought easily, whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse.
Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer’s life since Sir Harris Nicholas, with the help of original records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered on a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was “fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street,” if it were only for the alliteration; but we refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the probabilities are in its favor. That Chaucer, being at Milan, should not have found occasion to ride across so far as Padua, for the sake of seeing the most famous literary man of the day, is incredible. If Froissart could journey on horseback through Scotland and Wales, surely Chaucer, whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have ventured what would have been a mere pleasure-trip in comparison. I cannot easily bring myself to believe that he is not giving some touches of his own character in that of the Clerk of Oxford:—
“For him was liefer have at his bed’s head
A twenty bookës clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophië
Than robës rich, or fiddle or psaltrië:
But although that he were a philosòpher
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer:
Of study took he mostë care and heed;
Not one word spake he morë than was need:
All that he spake it was of high prudèncë,
And short and quick, and full of great sentencë;
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”
That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to Sir Harris Nicholas is for having disproved the story that Chaucer, imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of John of Northampton, had set himself free by betraying his accomplices. That a poet, one of whose leading qualities is his good sense and moderation, and who should seem to have practised his own rule, to
“Fly from the press and dwell with soothfastness;
Sufficë thee thy good though it be small,”
should have been concerned in any such political excesses, was improbable enough; but that he should add to this the baseness of broken faith was incredible except to such as in a doubtful story
“Demen gladly to the badder end.”
Sir Harris Nicholas has proved by the records that the fabric is baseless, and we may now read the poet’s fine verse,
“Truth is the highest thing a man may keep,”