There are literally hundreds of such "good things" which make Chaucer a constant delight to those who, by a very little practice, can understand him almost as easily as Shakespeare. Moreover he was a careful artist; he knew the principles of poetry and of story-telling, and before he wrote a song or a tale he considered both his subject and his audience, repeating to himself his own rule:
Ther nis no werkman, whatsoever he be,
That may bothe werkë wel and hastily:
This wol be doon at leysur, parfitly.
A second quality of Chaucer is his power of observation, a power so extraordinary that, unlike other poets, he did not need to invent scenes or characters but only to describe what he had seen and heard in this wonderful world. As he makes one of his characters say:
For certeynly, he that me made
To comen hider seydë me:
I shouldë bothë hear et see
In this place wonder thingës.
In the Canterbury Tales alone he employs more than a score of characters, and hardly a romantic hero among them; rather does he delight in plain men and women, who reveal their quality not so much in their action as in their dress, manner, or tricks of speech. For Chaucer has the glance of an Indian, which passes over all obvious matters to light upon one significant detail; and that detail furnishes the name or the adjective of the object. Sometimes his descriptions of men or nature are microscopic in their accuracy, and again in a single line he awakens the reader's imagination,—as when Pandarus (in Troilus), in order to make himself unobtrusive in a room where he is not wanted, picks up a manuscript and "makes a face," that is, he pretends to be absorbed in a story,
and fand his countenance As for to loke upon an old romance.
A dozen striking examples might be given, but we shall note only one. In the Book of the Duchess the poet is in a forest, when a chase sweeps by with whoop of huntsman and clamor of hounds. After the hunt, when the woods are all still, comes a little lost dog:
Hit com and creep to me as lowë
Right as hit haddë me y-knowë,
Hild down his heed and jiyned his eres,
And leyde al smouthë doun his heres.
I wolde han caught hit, and anoon
Hit fleddë and was fro me goon.
[Sidenote: CHAUCER'S HUMOR]
Next to his power of description, Chaucer's best quality is his humor, a humor which is hard to phrase, since it runs from the keenest wit to the broadest farce, yet is always kindly and human. A mendicant friar comes in out of the cold, glances about the snug kitchen for the best seat: