—that is enough.
Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy faces,
or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes, therefore,
disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with the
hardness and the freshness of an actual presence. Soon, however, we
notice something of greater importance than the gay and picturesque
appearance of the mediaeval world—the solidity which plumps it out, the
conviction which animates the characters. There is immense variety in
the _Canterbury Tales_, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent
type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young
women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know
them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl,
and this is what she looks like:
Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,
Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her
virginity:
I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.