The next poem of a serious character is the Squire’s Tale, which indeed so struck the admiration of Milton—himself profoundly penetrated by the spirit of the Romanz poetry—that it is by an allusion to the Squire’s Tale that he characterizes Chaucer when enumerating the great men of all ages, and when he places him beside Plato, Shakspeare, Æschylus, and his beloved Euripides: he supposes his Cheerful Man as evoking Chaucer—
And call up him who left half told
The story of Cambuscan bold.
The imagery of the Squire’s Tale was certainly well calculated to strike such a mind as Milton’s, so gorgeous, so stately, so heroic, and imbued with all the splendor of Oriental literature; for the scenery and subject of this poem bear evident marks of that Arabian influence which colors so much of the poetry of the Middle Ages, and which probably began to act upon the literature of Western Europe after the Crusades.
In point of deep pathos—pathos carried indeed to an extreme and perhaps hardly natural or justifiable pitch of intensity—we will now cite, among the graver tales of our pilgrims, the story put into the mouth of the Clerke of Oxenforde. This is the story of the Patient Griselda—a model of womanly and wifely obedience, who comes victoriously out of the most cruel and repeated ordeals inflicted upon her conjugal and maternal affections. The beautiful and angelic figure of the Patient Wife in this heart-rending story reminds us of one of those seraphic statues of Virgin Martyrs which stand with clasped hands and uplifted, imploring eye, in the carved niches of a Gothic cathedral—an eternal prayer in sculptured stone—
——Patience on a monument,
Smiling at Grief!
The subject of this tale is, as we mentioned some pages back, invented by Boccaccio, and first seen in 1374, by Petrarch, who was so struck with its beauty that he translated it into Latin, and it is from this translation that Chaucer drew his materials. The English poet indeed appears to have been ignorant of Boccaccio’s claim to the authorship, for he makes his “Clerke” say that he had learned it from “Fraunceis Petrarke, the laureat poéte.” Petrarch himself bears the strongest testimony to the almost overwhelming pathos of the story, for he relates that he gave it to a Paduan acquaintance of his to read, who fell into a repeated agony of passionate tears. Chaucer’s poem is written in the Italian stanza.
Of the comic tales the following will be found the most excellent—The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a droll apologue of the Cock and the Fox, in which the very absurdity of some of the accompaniments confers one of the highest qualities which a fable can possess, viz. so high a degree of individuality that the reader forgets that the persons of the little drama are animals, and sympathizes with them as human beings; the Merchant’s Tale, which, like the comic stories generally, though very indelicate, is yet replete with the richest and broadest humor; the Reve’s Tale, and many shorter stories distributed among the less prominent characters. But the crown and pearl of Chaucer’s drollery is the Miller’s Tale, in which the delicate and penetrating description of the various actors in the adventure can only be surpassed by the perfectly natural yet outrageously ludicrous catastrophe of the intrigue in which they move.
There is certainly nothing, in the vast treasury of ancient or modern humorous writing, at once so real, so droll, and so exquisitely enjoué in the manner of telling. It is true that the subject is not of the most delicate nature; but, though coarse and plain-speaking, Chaucer is never corrupt or vicious: his improprieties are rather the fruit of the ruder age in which he lived, and the turbid ebullitions of a rich and active imagination, than the cool, analyzing, studied profligacy—the more dangerous and corrupting because veiled under a false and morbid sentimentalism—which denies a great portion of the modern literature of too many civilized countries.