The influence of Boccaccio and, sometimes, of Dante is noticeable in the principal poems of the Italian period,—the Troilus and Criseyde, Hous of Fame, and Legende of Good Women. The Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of love that was not true. The Hous of Fame, an unfinished poem, gives a vision of a vast palace of ice on which the names of the famous are carved to await the melting rays of the sun. The Legende of Good Women is a series of stories of those who, like Alcestis, are willing to give up everything for love. In A Dream of Fair Women Tennyson says:—
"'The Legend of Good Women,' long ago
Sung by the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below;
Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."
In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less and less on an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal ride to Canterbury on an English Pegasus.
General Plan of the Canterbury Tales.—People in general have always been more interested in stories than in any other form of literature. Chaucer probably did not realize that he had such positive genius for telling tales in verse that the next five hundred years would fail to produce his superior in that branch of English literature.
[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.]
All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which he could fit the stories that occurred to him, to make them something more than mere stray tales, which might soon be forgotten. Chaucer's great contemporary Italian storyteller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of representing some of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the plague, and telling in their retirement the tales that he used in his Decameron. It is not certain that Chaucer received from the Decameron his suggestions for the Canterbury Tales, although he was probably in Florence at the same time as Boccaccio.
In 1170 Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered at the altar. He was considered both a martyr and a saint, and his body was placed in a splendid mausoleum at the Cathedral. It was said that miracles were worked at his tomb, that the sick were cured, and that the worldly affairs of those who knelt at his shrine prospered. It became the fashion for men of all classes to go on pilgrimages to his tomb. As robbers infested the highways, the pilgrims usually waited at some inn until there was a sufficient band to resist attack. In time the journey came to be looked on as a holiday, which relieved the monotony of everyday life. About 1385 Chaucer probably went on such a pilgrimage. To furnish amusement, as the pilgrims cantered along, some of them may have told stories. The idea occurred to Chaucer to write a collection of such tales as the various pilgrims might have been supposed to tell on their journey. The result was the Canterbury Tales.
Characters in the Tales.—Chaucer's plan is superior to Boccaccio's; for only the nobility figure as story-tellers in the Decameron, while the Canterbury pilgrims represent all ranks of English life, from the knight to the sailor.
The Prologue to the Tales places these characters before us almost as distinctly as they would appear in real life. At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across the Thames from London, we see that merry band of pilgrims on a pleasant April day. We look first upon a manly figure who strikes us as being every inch a knight. His cassock shows the marks of his coat of mail.
"At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene.
* * * * *
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
In al his lyf, un-to no maner wight.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight."