In our last chapter I spoke of that Geoffrey of Monmouth who about the
middle of the twelfth century wrote a history--mostly apocryphal--in
which was imbedded a germ of the King Arthur fables. We traced these
fables, growing under the successive touches of Wace and Map and Layamon
into full-fledged legends, repeated over and over; and finally, with
splendid affluence of color appearing on the literary horizon of our own
day. I spoke of King Richard I. and of his song loving, and of his blood
loving, and of his royal frankness: then of John, that renegade brother
of his--of how he granted _Magna Charta_, killed poor Prince Arthur, and
stirred such a current of war as caused the loss of Normandy to England.
I spoke of the connection of this loss with the consolidation of the
language; of how Robert of Gloucester made a rhyming history that was
in a new English; of how the name of Sir John Mandeville was associated
with great lies, in the same tongue; how the religious houses made books,
and fattened on the best of the land, and grew corrupt; and last--of how
we, if we had lived in those days, would have found disport for our idle
hours and consolation for our serious ones.
_Roger Bacon._
Starting now from about the same point in time where we left off, our
opening scene will take us to the old University town of Oxford. It is
a rare city for a young American to visit; its beautiful High Street,
its quaint Colleges, its Christ Church Hall, its libraries, its Magdalen
walks and tower, its charming gardens of St. John’s and Trinity, its near
Park of Blenheim, its fragrant memories--all, make it a place where one
would wish to go and long to linger. But in the far-away time we speak of
it was a walled city, with narrow streets, and filthy lodging houses; yet
great parliaments had been held there; the royal domain of Woodstock was
near by with its Palace; the nunnery was standing, where was educated
the Fair Rosamund; a little farther away was the great religious house
of Abingdon and the village of Cumnor; but of all its present august and
venerable array of colleges only one or two then existed--Merton, and
perhaps Balliol, or the University.[33]
But the schools here had won a very great reputation in the current of
the thirteenth century, largely through the scholarship and popularity
of Grosseteste, one while Bishop of Lincoln, who held ministrations
at Oxford by reason of his connection with a Franciscan brotherhood
established here; and among those crop-haired Franciscans was a
monk--whom we have made this visit to Oxford to find--named Roger Bacon.
He had been not only student but teacher there; and a few miles south
from the King’s Arms Hotel in Broad Street, Oxford, is still standing
a church tower, in the little parish of Sunningwell, from which--as
tradition affirms--Roger Bacon studied the heavens: for he believed in
Astrology, and believed too in the transmutation of metals; and he got
the name of magician, and was cashiered and imprisoned twice or thrice
for this and other strange beliefs. But he believed most of all in the
full utterance of his beliefs, and in experimenting, and in interrogating
nature, and distrusting conventionalisms, and in search for himself into
all the mysteries, whether of nature or theology.
He had sprung from worthy and well-to-do parents in the Western County
of Somersetshire. He had spent very much money for those days on his
education; had obtained a Doctorate at Paris; his acuteness and his
capacity for study were everywhere recognized; he knew more of Greek than
most of his teachers, and more of Hebrew than most of the Rabbis, and
more of Chemistry and Physics generally than probably any other man in
England. He took a Friar’s vows, as we have said; but these did not save
him from interdiction by the Chief of his Order, by whom he was placed
under ten years of surveillance at Paris--his teachings silenced, and he
suffering almost to starvation. A liberal Pope (for those days), Clement
IV., by his intervention set free the philosopher’s pen again; and
there came of this freedom the _Opus Majus_ by which he is most worthily
known. Subsequently he was permitted to return to his old sphere of study
in Oxford, where he pursued afresh his scientific investigations, but
coupled with them such outspoken denunciations of the vices and ignorance
of his brother Friars, as to provoke new condemnation and an imprisonment
that lasted for fourteen years--paying thus, in this accredited mediæval
way, for his freedom of speech.
It is not improbable that we owe to him and to his optical studies--in
some humble degree--the eye-glasses that make reading possible to old
eyes: and his books, first of any books from English sources, described
how sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre properly combined will make
thunder and lightning (_sic facies tonitrum et coruscationem_). We call
the mixture gunpowder. In his _Opus Majus_ (he wrote only in Latin, and
vastly more than has appeared in printed form) scholars find some of
the seeds of the riper knowledges which came into the _Novum Organum_
of another and later Bacon--with whom we must not confound this sharp,
eager, determined, inquiring Franciscan friar. He is worthy to be kept
in mind as the Englishman who above all others living in that turbid
thirteenth century, saw through the husks of things to their very core.
He died at the close of the century--probably in the year 1294; and
I have gone back to that far-away time--somewhat out of our forward
track--and have given you a glimpse of this Franciscan innovator and
wrestler with authorities, in order that I might mate him with two other
radical thinkers whose period of activity belonged to the latter half of
the succeeding century: I mean Langlande and Wyclif. And before we go on
to speak of these two, we will set up a few way-marks, so that we may not
lose our historic bearings in the drift of the intervening years.
Bacon died, as we have said, in 1294. William Wallace fought his great
battle of Cambuskenneth in 1297. Those who have read that old favorite
of school-boys, Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs,” will not need to have
their memories refreshed about William Wallace. Indeed, that hero will be
apt to loom too giant-like in their thought, and with a halo about him
which I suspect sober history would hardly justify. Wallace was executed
at Smithfield (Miss Porter says he died of grief before the axe fell)
in 1305; and that stout, flax-haired King Edward I., who had humbled
Scotland at Falkirk--who was personally a match for the doughtiest of
his knights--who was pious (as the times went), and had set up beautiful
memorial crosses to his good Queen Eleanor--who had revived King Arthur’s
Round Table at Kenilworth, died only two years after he had cruelly
planted the head of Wallace on London Bridge. Then came the weak Edward
II., and the victories of Bruce of Bannockburn, and that weary Piers
Gaveston story, and the shocking death of the King in Berkeley Castle.
The visitor to Berkeley (it is in Gloucestershire, and only two miles
away from station on the Midland Railway) can still see the room where
the murder was done: and this Castle of Berkeley--strangely enough--has
been kept in repair, and inhabited continuously from the twelfth century
until now; its moat, its keep, and its warders walks are all intact.
After this Edward II. came the great Edward III.--known to us through
Froissart and the Black Prince[34] and Crécy and Poitiers, and by
Windsor Castle--which he built--and by Chaucer and Wyclif and Langlande
and Gower, who grew up while he was king; known to us also in a worse
way, for outliving all his good qualities, and becoming in his last days
a peevish and tempestuous voluptuary.
Some few foreign way-marks I also give, that the reader may have more
distinctly in mind this great historic epoch. Dante died in exile at
Ravenna, six years before Edward III. came to power. Boccaccio was then a
boy of fourteen, and Petrarch nine years his elder. And on the year that
Crécy was fought and won--through the prowess of the Black Prince, and
when the Last of the Tribunes, as you see him in Bulwer Lytton’s novel,
was feeling his way to lordship in Rome,--there was living somewhere in
Shropshire, a country-born, boy poet--not yet ripened into utterance,
but looking out with keen eyes and soreness of heart upon the sufferings
of poor country folk, and upon the wantonness of the monks, and the
extravagance of the rich, and the hatefulness of the proud--all which was
set forth at a later day in the Vision of Piers Plowman.
_William Langlande._
This was William Langlande[35] (or Langley, as others call him), reputed
author of the poem I have named. It makes a little book--earliest, I
think, of all books written in English--which you will be apt to find
in a well-appointed private library of our day. I won’t say that it is
bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are)
as a good and sufficient type of old respectabilities. Yet, for all
this, it is reasonably readable; with crabbed alliterative rhythm;--some
Latin intermixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as some allege);
and such knowledge of life and of current shortcomings among all sorts
of people as showed him to be a wide-awake and fearless observer. It is
in the form of an Allegory, Christian in its motive; so that you might
almost say that the author was an immature and crude and yet sharper
kind of John Bunyan who would turn _Great-Heart_ into a _Plowman_. The
nomenclature also brings to mind the tinker of the Pilgrim’s Progress;
there is a Sir _Do-Well_ and his daughter _Do-Better_: then there is _Sir
In-wit_ with his sons _See-well_ and _Say-well_ and _Hear-well_, and the
doughtiest of them all--_Sir Work-well_. We may, I think, as reasonably
believe that Bunyan hovered over this book, as that Milton took hints
from the picture of Pandemonium attributed to Cædmon.
Langlande is a little mixed and raw oftentimes; but he is full of
shrewdness and of touches of a rough and unwashed humor. There is little
tenderness of poetic feeling in his verse; and scarcely ever does it rise
to anything approaching stateliness; but it keeps a good dog-trot jog,
as of one who knew what he was doing, and meant to do it. What he meant
was--to whip the vices of the priests and to scourge the covetousness of
the rich and of the men in power. It is English all over; English[36] in
the homeliness of its language; he makes even Norman words sound homely;
English in spirit too; full of good, hearty, grumbling humor--a sort of
predated and poetic kind of Protestantism. Plums might be picked out of
it for the decoration of a good radical or agrarian speech of to-day.
Of his larger religious and political drift no extracts will give one a
proper idea; only a reading from beginning to end will do this. One or
two snatches of his verse I give, to show his manner:
And thanne cam coveitise,
Kan I hym naght discryve,
So hungrily and holwe
Sire Hervy hym loked.
He was bitel-browed,
And baber-lipped also
With two blered eighen
As a blynd hagge;
And as a letheren purs
Lolled his chekes,
Well sidder [wider] than his chyn
Thei chyveled [shrivelled] for elde;
And as a bonde-man of his bacon
His berd was bi-draveled,
With an hood on his heed.
A lousy hat above
And in a tawny tabard
Of twelf wynter age.
--2847 _Pass. V._
And again, from the same _Passus_ (he dividing thus his poem into _steps_
or _paces_) I cite this self-drawn picture of Envy:
Betwene manye and manye
I make debate ofte,
That bothe lif and lyme
Is lost thorugh my speche.
And when I mete hym in market
That I moost hate,
I hailse hym hendely [politely]
As I his frend were;
For he is doughtier than I,
I dar do noon oother:
Ac, hadde I maistrie and myght.
God woot my wille!
And whanne I come to the kirk
And sholde kneel to the roode,
And preye for the peple …
Awey fro the auter thanne
Turne I myne eighen
And bi-holde Eleyne
Hath a newe cote;
I wisshe thanne it were myn,
And al the web after.
For who so hath moore than I
That angreth me soore,
And thus I lyve love-lees,
Like a luther [mad] dogge;
That al my body bolneth [swelleth]
For bitter of my galle.
--_vers._ 2667.
It is a savage picture; and as savagely true as was ever drawn of Envy.
Those who cultivated the elegancies of letters, and delighted in the
pretty rhyming-balance of Romance verse, would hardly have relished
him; but the average thinker and worker would and did. It is specially
noteworthy that the existing MSS. of this poem, of which there are very
many, are without expensive ornamentation by illuminated initial letters,
or otherwise, indicating that its circulation was among those who did
not buy a book for its luxuries of “make-up,” but for its pith. A new
popularity came to the book after printing was begun, and made it known
to those who sympathized with its protesting spirit;--most of all when
the monasteries went down and readers saw how this old grumbler had
prophesied truly--in saying “the Abbot of Abingdon and all his people
should get a knock from a king”--as they did; and a hard one it was.
Langlande was born in the West, and had wandered over the beautiful
Malvern hills of Worcestershire in his day but he went afterward to live
in London, which he knew from top to bottom; had a wife there, “Kytte,”
and a daughter, “Calote;”[37] shaved his head like a priest; was tall--so
tall he came to be called “Long Will.” He showed little respect for fine
dresses, though he saw them all; he was in London when Chaucer was there
and when the greater poet was writing, and had higher-placed friends
than himself; but he never met him,--from anything that appears; never
met Wyclif either, with whom he must have had very much thinking in
common, and who also must have been in London many a time when tall Will
Langlande sidled along Fenchurch Street, or Cornhill. Yet he is worthy to
be named with him as representing a popular seam in that great drift of
independent and critical thought, which was to ripen into the Reformation.
_John Wyclif._
In the year when gunpowder was first burned in battle, and when Rienzi
was trying to poise himself with a good balance on the rocking shoulders
of the Roman people, John Wyclif, the great English reformer and the
first translator of the Bible, was just turned of twenty and poring over
his books, not improbably in that Balliol College, Oxford--of which in
the ripeness of his age he was to become Master.
We know little of his early personal history, save that he came from
a beautiful Yorkshire valley in the North of England, where the Tees,
forming the border line of the County of Durham, sweeps past the little
parish of Wyclif, and where a manor-house of the same name--traditionally
the birthplace of the Reformer--stands upon a lift of the river hank.
Its grounds stretch away to those “Rokeby” woods, whose murmurs and
shadows relieve the dullest of the poems of Scott.
But there is no record of him thereabout: if indeed he were born upon
that lift of the Tees bank, the proprietors thereof--who through many
generations were stanch Romanists--would have shown no honor to the
arch-heretic; and it is noteworthy that within a chapel attached to the
Wyclif manor-house, mass was said and the Pope reverenced, down to a very
recent time. John Wyclif, in the great crowd of his writings, whether
English or Latin, told no story of himself or of his young days. We have
only clear sight of him when he has reached full manhood--when he has
come to the mastership of Balliol Hall, and to eloquent advocacy of the
rights and dignities of England, as against the Papal demand for tribute.
On this service he goes up to London, and is heard there--maybe in
Parliament; certainly is heard with such approval that he is, only a few
years thereafter--sent with a commission, to treat with ambassadors from
the Pope, at the old city of Bruges.
This was a rich city--called the Venice of the North--and princes and
nobles from all Europe were to be met there; its great town-house even
then lifted high into the air that Belfry of Bruges which has become in
our day the nestling-place of song. But Wyclif was not overawed by any
splendors of scene or association. He insisted doggedly upon the rights
of Englishmen as against Papal pretensions. John of Gaunt, a son of the
king, stood by Wyclif; not only befriending him there, but afterward when
Papish bulls were thundered against him, and when he was summoned up to
London--as befell in due time--to answer for his misdeeds; and when the
populace, who had caught a liking for the stalwart independence of the
man, crowded through the streets (tall Will Langlande very probably among
them), to stand between the Reformer and the judges of the Church. He did
not believe in Ecclesiastic hierarchies; and it is quite certain that he
was as little liked by the abbots and the bishops and the fat vicars, as
by the Pope.
I have said he was befriended by John of Gaunt: and this is a name which
it is worth while for students of English history to remember; not only
because he was a brother of the famous Black Prince (and a better man
than he, though he did not fight so many battles), but because he was
also a good friend of the poet Chaucer--as we shall find. It will perhaps
help one to keep him in mind, if I refer to that glimpse we get of him in
the early scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard II., where he makes
a play upon his name:
O, how that name befits my composition!
Old Gaunt, indeed! and gaunt in being old.
Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast
And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?
A good effigy of this John, in his robes, is on the glass of a window in
All-Souls’ College, Oxford.
But such great friends, and Wyclif numbered the widow of the Black Prince
among them, could not shield him entirely from Romish wrath, when he
began to call the Pope a “cut-purse;” and his arguments were as scathing
as his epithets, and had more reason in them. He was compelled to forego
his teachings at Oxford, and came to new trials,[38] at which--as
traditions run--he wore an air of great dignity; and old portraits show
us a thin, tall figure--a little bent with over-study; his features
sharp-cut, with lips full of firmness, a flowing white beard and piercing
eyes--glowing with the faith that was in him. This was he who blocked out
the path along which England stumbled through Lollardry quagmires, and
where Huss, the Bohemian, walked in after days with a clumsy, forward
tread, and which Luther in his later time put all alight with his torch
of flame.
The King--and it was one of the last good deeds of Edward III.--gave
to the old man who was railed at by Popes and bishops, a church living
at Lutterworth, a pleasant village in Leicestershire, upon a branch of
that Avon, which flows by Stratford Church; and here the white-haired old
man--some five hundred years ago (1384) finished his life; and here the
sexton of the church will show one to-day the gown in which he preached,
and the pulpit in which he stood.
Even now I have not spoken of those facts about this early Reformer,
which are best kept in memory, and which make his name memorable in
connection with the literature of England. In the quiet of Lutterworth
he translated the Latin Bible (probably not knowing well either Greek or
Hebrew, as very few did in that day); not doing all this work himself,
but specially looking after the Gospels, and perhaps all of the New
Testament.
The reader will, I think, be interested in a little fragment of this work
of his (from Matthew viii.).
“Sothely [verily] Jhesus seeynge many cumpanyes about hym,
bad _his disciplis_ go ouer the watir. And oo [one] scribe or
_a man of lawe_, commynge to, saide to hym--Maistre, I shall
sue [follow] thee whidir euer thou shalt go. And Jhesus said
to hym, Foxis han dichis _or borrowis_ [holes] and briddes of
the eir han nestis; but mannes sone hath nat wher he reste his
heued. Sotheli an other of his disciplis saide to hym--Lord,
suffre me go first and birye my fadir. Forsothe Jhesus saide to
hym, Sue thou me, and late dede men birye her dead men.”
It is surely not very hard reading;--still less so in the form as revised
by Purvey,[39] an old assistant of his in the Parish of Lutterworth;
and it made the groundwork of an English sacred dialect, which with its
_Thees_ and _Thous_ and _Speaketh_ and _Heareth_ and _Prayeth_ has given
its flavor to all succeeding translations, and to all utterances of
praise and thanksgiving in every English pulpit.
Not only this, but Wyclif by his translation opened an easy English
pathway into the arcana of sacred mysteries, which in all previous
time--save for exceptional parts, such as the paraphrase of Cædmon, or
the Ormulum, or the Psalter of Aldhelm and other fragmentary Anglo-Saxon
versions of Scripture--had been veiled from the common people in
the dimness of an unknown tongue. But from the date of Wyclif’s
translation--forward, forever--whatever man, rich or poor, could read an
English ordinance of the King, or a bye-law of a British parish, could
also--though he might be driven to stealthy reading--spell his way back,
through the old aisles of Sacred History, where Moses and the prophets
held their place, and into the valleys of Palestine, where Bethlehem lay,
and where Christ was hung upon the tree.
_Chaucer._
Now we come to a Poet of these times; not a poet by courtesy, not a
small poet, but a real and a great one. His name is Chaucer. You may
not read him; you may find his speech too old-fashioned to please you;
you may not easily get through its meaning; but if you do, and come to
study him with any warmth, the more you study him the more you will
like him. And this--not because there are curious and wonderful tales
in his verse to interest you; not because your passion will be kindled
by any extraordinary show of dramatic power; but because his humor, and
gentleness, and grace of touch, and exquisite harmonies of language will
win upon you page by page, and story by story.
He was born--probably in London--some time during the second quarter of
the fourteenth century;[40] and there is reason to believe that an early
home of his was in or near Thames Street, which runs parallel with the
river,--a region now built up and overshadowed with close lines of tall
and grimy warehouses. But the boy Chaucer, living there five hundred and
more years ago, might have caught between the timber houses glimpses
of cultivated fields lying on the Southwark shores; and if he had
wandered along Wallbrook to Cheapside, and thence westerly by Newgate to
Smithfield Common--where he may have watched tournaments that Froissart
watched, and Philippa, queen of Edward III., had watched--he would
have found open country; and on quiet days would have heard the birds
singing there, and have seen green meadows lying on either side the river
Fleet--which river is now lost in sewers, and is planted over with houses.
On Ludgate Hill, in that far-off time, rose the tall and graceful spire
of old St. Paul’s, and underneath its roof was a vista of Gothic arches
seven hundred feet in length. The great monastery of the Templars--and
of the Knights of St. John--where we go now to see that remnant of it,
called the Temple Church,--had, only shortly before, passed into the
keeping of the Lawyers; the Strand was like a country road, with great
country-houses and gardens looking upon the water; Charing Cross was a
hamlet midway between the Temple and a parish called Westminster, where a
huge Abbey Church stood by the river bank.
Some biographers have labored to show that Chaucer was of high
family--with titles in it. But I think we care very little about
this; one story, now fully accredited, makes his father a vintner,
or wine-dealer, with a coat-of-arms, showing upon one half a red bar
upon white, and upon the other white on red; as if--hints old Thomas
Fuller--’twas dashed with red wine and white. This escutcheon with its
parti-colored bars may be seen in the upper left corner of the portrait
of Chaucer, which hangs now in the picture-gallery at Oxford. And--for
that matter--it was not a bad thing to be a vintner in that day; for we
have record of one of them who, in the year after the battle of Poitiers,
entertained at his house in the Vintry, Edward King of England, John King
of France, David King of Scotland, and the King of Cyprus. And he not
only dined them, but won their money at play; and afterward, in a very
unking-like fashion--paid back the money he had won.
Chaucer was a student in his young days; but never--as old stories
ran--at either Cambridge or Oxford; indeed, there is no need that we
place him at one or the other. There were schools in London in those
times--at St. Paul’s and at Westminster--in either of which he could
have come by all the scholarly epithets or allusions that appear in his
earlier poems; and for the culture that declares itself in his riper
days, we know that he was more or less a student all his life--loving
books, and proud of his fondness for them, and showing all up and down
his poems traces of his careful reading and of an observation as close
and as quick.
It is the poet’s very self, who, borne away in the eagle’s clutch amongst
the stars, gets this comment from approving Jove[41]:
Thou hearest neither that nor this,
For when thy labor all done is,
And hast made all thy reckiningës
In stead of rest and of new thingës,
Thou goest homë to thine house anon
And all so dombe as any stone,
Thou sittest at another bokë
Till fully dazed is thy lokë.
But though we speak of Chaucer as bookish and scholarly, it must not be
supposed that he aimed at, or possessed the nice critical discernment,
with respect to the literary work of others, which we now associate
with highest scholarly attainments; it may well happen that his bookish
allusions are not always “by the letter,” or that he may misquote, or
strain a point in interpretation. He lived before the days of exegetical
niceties. He is attracted by large effects; he searches for what may
kindle his enthusiasms, and put him upon his own trail of song. Books
were nothing to him if they did not bring illumination; where he could
snatch that, he burrowed--but always rather toward the light than toward
the depths. He makes honey out of coarse flowers; not so sure always--nor
much caring to be sure--of the name and habitudes of the plants he
rifles. He stole not for the theft’s sake, but for the honey’s sake; and
he read not for cumulation of special knowledges, but to fertilize and
quicken his own spontaneities.
Nor was this poet ever so shapen to close study, but the woods or the
birds or the flowers of a summery day would take the bend from his back,
and straighten him for a march into the fields:
----There is gamë none,
That from my bookës maketh me to gone,
Save certainly whan that the month of Maie
Is comen, and that I heare the foulës sing,
And that the flowris ginnen for to spring--
Farewell my booke, and my devocion!
And swift upon this in that musical “Legende of Good Women,” comes his
rhythmical crowning of the Daisy--never again, in virtue of his verse, to
be discrowned--
----above all the flowris in the mede
Thanne love I moste these flowris white and rede;
Soche that men callin Daisies in our toun
To ’hem I have so grete affectionn
As I said erst, whan comin is the Maie,
That in my bedde there dawith me no daie
That I n’ am up, and walking in the mede
To sene this floure ayenst the sunnë sprede,
As she that is of all flowris the floure,
Fulfilled of all vertue and honoure
And evir alikë faire and freshe, of hewe,
And evir I love it and ever alikë newe.
These lines of his have given an everlasting perfume to that odorless
flower.
How it befell that this son of a vintner came first to have close
association with members of the royal household--household of the great
Edward III.--we cannot tell; but it is certain that he did come at an
early day to have position in the establishment of the King’s son, Prince
Lionel, Duke of Clarence; he was sometime valet, too, of Edward III., and
in other years a familiar _protégé_ of John of Gaunt--putting his poet’s
gloss upon courtly griefs and love-makings.
It is certain, moreover, that in the immediate service of either Prince
or King, he went to the wars--as every young man of high spirit in
England yearned to do, when war was so great a part of the business of
life, and when the Black Prince was galloping in armor and in victory
over the fields of Guienne. But it was a bad excursion the poet hit
upon; he went when disaster attended the English forces; he was taken
prisoner, and though ransomed shortly thereafter--as the record shows--it
is uncertain when he returned; uncertain if he did not linger for years
among the vineyards of France; maybe writing there his translation of the
famous _Roman de la Rose_[42]--certainly loving this and other such, and
growing by study of these Southern melodies into graces of his own, to
overlap and adorn his Saxon sturdiness of speech.
There are recent continental critics[43] indeed, who claim him as French,
and as finding not only his felicities of verse, but his impulse and
his motives among the lilies of France. He does love these lilies of a
surety; but I think he loves the English daisies better, and that it
is with a thoroughly English spirit that he “powders” the meadows with
their red and white, and sets among them the green blades of those island
grasses, which flash upon his “morwenyngs of Maie.” To these times may
possibly belong--if indeed Chaucer wrote it--“The Court of Love.” Into
the discussion of its authenticity we do not enter; we run to cover under
an ignorance which is more blissful than the wisdom that wearies itself
with comparison of dates, with laws of prosody, with journeyman-like
estimate of the tinklings of this or that spurt of rhyming habit. If
Chaucer did not write it, we lift our hat to the unknown melodist--who
can put the birds in choir--and pass on.
When our poet does reappear in London, it is not to tell any story of the
war--of its hazards, or of its triumphs. Indeed, it is remarkable that
this lissome poet, whose words like bangles shook out all tunes to his
step, and who lived in the very heart of the days of Poitiers--when the
doughty young Black Prince kindled a martial furor that was like the old
crusade craze to follow _Cœur de Lion_ to battle--remarkable, I say, that
Chaucer, living on the high tide of war--living, too, in a court where
he must have met Froissart, that pet of the Queen, who gloried in giving
tongue to his enthusiasm about the deeds of knighthood--wonderful, I say,
that Chaucer should not have brought into any of his tales or rhymes the
din and the alarums and the seething passions of war. There are indeed
glimpses of fluttering pennons and of spear thrusts; maybe, also, purple
gouts of blood welling out from his page; but these all have the unreal
look of the tourney, to which they mostly attach; he never scores martial
scenes with a dagger. For all that Crécy or its smoking artillery had
to do with his song, he might have sung a century earlier, or he might
have sung a century later. Indeed, he does not seem to us a man of
action, notwithstanding his court connection and his somewhile official
place;--not even a man of loudly declared public policy, but always the
absorbed, introspective, painstaking, quiet observer, to whom Nature in
the gross, with its humanities now kindled by wanton appetites, and now
lifted by reverence and love (with the everlasting broidery of flowers
and trees and sunshine), was always alluring him from things accidental
and of the time--though it were time of royal Philip’s ruin, or of a
conquest of Aquitaine.
Yet withal, this Chaucer is in some sense a man of the world and
courtier. The “Boke of the Duchesse” tells us this. And he can weave
chaplets for those who have gone through the smoke of battles--though his
own inclination may not lead him thither. To a date not very remote from
that which belongs to the “Duchesse” must in all probability be assigned
that other well-known minor poem of Chaucer’s, called the “Parlament of
Foules.”[44] There are stories of his love-lornness in his young days,
and of marriage delayed and of marriage made good--coming mostly from
those who paint large pictures with few pigments--and which are exceeding
hazy and indeterminate of outline: his “Troilus and Cresseide” make
us know that he could go through the whole gamut of love, and fawning
and teasing and conquest and forgetting, in lively earnest as well as
fancy--if need were.
We have better data and surer ground to go upon when we come to score his
official relations. We know that when not very far advanced in age (about
1370) he went to the continent on the King’s service; accomplishing it
so well--presumably--that he is sent again, very shortly after, with a
commission--his journey calling him to Genoa and Florence; Italy and the
Mediterranean, then, probably for the first time, with all their glamour
of old story, coming to his view. Some biographers make out, from chance
lines in his after-poems, that he went over to Padua and saw Petrarch
there, and learned of him some stories, which he afterward wrought into
his garland of the Canterbury Tales. Possibly;[45] but it was not an
easy journey over the mountains to Padua in those days, even if Petrarch
had been domiciled there,--which is very doubtful; for the Italian poet,
old and feeble, passed most of the latter years of his life at Arqua
among the Euganean hills; and if Chaucer had met him, Petrarch would have
been more apt to ask the man from far-away, murky England, about his
country and King and the Prince Lionel (dead in those days), who only a
few years before had married, at Milan, a daughter of the Visconti--than
to bore him with a story at second hand (from Boccaccio) about the
patient Griselda.
However this may be, it is agreed by nearly all commentators, that by
reason of his southward journeyings and his after-familiarity with
Italian literature (if indeed this familiarity were not of earlier date),
that his own poetic outlook became greatly widened, and he fell away, in
large degree, from his old imitative allegiance to the jingling measures
of France, and that pretty
“Maze of to and fro,
Where light-heeled numbers laugh and go.”
Through all this time he is in receipt of favors from the
Government--sometimes in the shape of direct pension--sometimes of an
annual gift of wine--sometimes in moneys for payment of his costs of
travel;--sometime, too, he has a money-getting place in the Customs.
John of Gaunt continues his stalwart friend. Indeed this Prince, late in
life, and when he had come to the title of Duke of Lancaster, married,
in third espousals, a certain Kate Swynford (_née_ Roet), who, if much
current tradition may be trusted, was a sister of Chaucer’s wife; it was,
to be sure, looked upon by court people (for various reasons) as a match
beneath the Duke; and Froissart tells us with a chirrupy air[46] of easy
confidence (but there is no mention of the poet) that the peeresses of
the court vowed they would have nothing to do with the new Duchess of
Lancaster--by which it may be seen that fine ladies had then the same
methods of punishing social audacities which they have now. The tradition
has been given a new lease of life by the memorial window which under
rule of Dean Stanley was set in Westminster Abbey;[47] and, however
the truth may be, Chaucer’s life-long familiarity in the household of
Lancaster is undoubted; and it is every way likely that about the knee of
the poet may have frisked and played the little Hal. (b. 1367), who came
afterward to be King Henry IV. It is to this monarch, newly come to the
throne, that Chaucer addresses--in his latter days, and with excellent
effect--that little piquant snatch of verse[48] about the lowness of his
purse:
I am so sorrie now that ye be light,
For certes, but ye make me heavy cheere,
Me were as lief be laid upon my bere
For which unto your mercie thus I crie
Be heavie againe, or ellës mote I die.
Yet he seems never to lose his good humor or his sweet complacency;
there is no carping; there is no swearing that is in earnest. His
whole character we seem to see in that picture of him which his friend
Occleve painted; a miniature, to be sure, and upon the cover of a MS. of
Occleve’s poems; but it is the best portrait of him we have. Looking at
it--though ’tis only half length--you would say he was what we call a
dapper man; well-fed, for he loved always the good things of life--“not
drinkless altogether, as I guess;” nor yet is it a bluff English face; no
beefiness; regular features--almost feminine in fineness of contour--with
light beard upon upper lip and chin; smooth cheeks; lips full (rosy red,
they say, in the painting); eye that is keen,[49] and with a sparkle
of humor in it; hands decorously kept; one holding a rosary, the other
pointing--and pointing as men point who see what they point at, and make
others see it too; his hood, which seems a part of his woollen dress,
is picturesquely drawn about his head, revealing only a streak of hair
over his temple; you see it is one who studies picturesqueness even in
costume, and to the trimming of his beard into a forked shape;--no lint
on his robe--you may be sure of that;--no carelessness anywhere: dainty,
delicate, studious of effects, but with mirth and good nature shimmering
over his face. Yet no vagueness or shakiness of purpose show their weak
lines; and in his jaw there is a certain staying power that kept him firm
and active and made him pile book upon book in the new, sweet English
tongue, which out of the dialects of Essex and of the East of England he
had compounded, ordered, and perfected, and made the pride of every man
born to the inheritance of that Island speech.
And it is with such looks and such forces and such a constitutional
cheeriness, that this blithe poet comes to the task of enchaining
together his Canterbury Tales, with their shrewd trappings of
Prologue--his best work, getting its last best touches after he is fairly
turned of middle age, if indeed he were not already among the sixties. Is
it not wonderful--the distinctness with which we see, after five hundred
years have passed, those nine and twenty pilgrims setting out on the
sweet April day, to travel down through the country highways and meadows
of Kent!
The fields are all green, “y-powdered with daisies;” the birds are
singing; the white blossoms are beginning to show upon the hedge-rows.
And the Pilgrims, one and all, are so touched and colored by his
shrewdness and aptness of epithet that we see them as plainly as if they
had been cut out, figure by figure, from the very middle of that far-away
century.
There goes the Knight--
And that a worthy man,
That from the timë that he first began
To ryden out, he lovéd chyvalrie
Trouth and honoúr, freedom and courtesie.
And after him his son, the Squire, the bright bachelor, who
Was as fresh as is the month of May;
Schort was his goune, with sleevës long and wide,
Well coude he sit on hors, and fairë ride.
He coudë songës make and wel endite,
Joust and eke dance, and wel portray and write.
Then there comes the charming Prioress--
Ycleped Madame Eglantine.
Ful well she sang the servicë divine,
Entunëd in hir nose ful semëly:
And Frensch she spak ful fair and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford attë Bowe,
For Frensch of Paris was to hir unknowe.
…
Full fetys was her cloke, as I was waar
Of smal coral aboute hir arme she baar
A paire of bedës gauded all with grene,
And thereon heng a broch of gold ful schene
On which was first y-writ a crownéd A,
And after--_Amor Vincit Omnia_!
Then comes the Monk, who has a shiny pate, who is stout, well fed,
pretentious; his very trappings make a portrait--
And when he rood, men might his bridel heere
Gingling in a whistlyng wynd as cleere
And eek as loude as doth the chapel belle.
Again, there was a Friar--a wanton and a merry one--rollicksome, and
loving rich houses only,
----who lispéd for his wantonnesse,
To make his Englissch swete upon his tunge;
His eyen twinkled in his hed aright
As do the starrës in the frosty night.
And among them all goes, with mincing step, the middle-aged, vulgar,
well-preserved, coquettish, shrewish Wife of Bath:
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streyte y-tied, and schoos ful moiste and newe,
Bold was her face, and faire and reed of hewe.
And so--on, and yet on--for the twenty or more; all touched with those
little, life-like strokes which only genius can command, and which keep
the breath in those old Pilgrims to Canterbury, as if they travelled
there, between the blooming hedge rows, on every sunshiny day of every
succeeding spring.
I know that praise of these and of the way Chaucer marshals them at the
Tabard, and starts them on their way, and makes them tell their stories,
is like praise of June or of sunshine. All poets and all readers have
spoken it ever since the morning they set out upon their journeyings; and
many an American voyager of our day has found best illumination for that
pleasant jaunt through County Kent toward the old towers of Canterbury
in his recollections of Chaucer’s Pilgrims. It is true that the poet’s
wayside marks are not close or strong; no more does a meteor leave other
track than the memory of its brightness. We cannot fix of a surety upon
the “ale-stake” where the Pardoner did “byten on a cake,” and there may
be some doubt about the “litel” town
which that y-cleped is, Bob-up-and-Down.
But there is no doubt at all about the old Watling Road and Deptford, and
the sight of Greenwich Heights, which must have shown a lifted forest
away to their left; nor about Boughton Hill (by Boughton-under-Blean),
with its far-off view of sea-water and of sails, and its nearer view of
the great cathedral dominating Canterbury town. Up to the year 1874 the
traveller might have found a Tabard[50] tavern in Southwark, which at
about 1600 had replaced the old inn that Chaucer knew; but it repeated
the old quaintness, and with its lumbering balconies and littered court
and droll signs, and its saggings and slants and smells, carried one
back delightfully to fourteenth-century times. And in Canterbury, at the
end of the two or three days’[51] pilgrim journey, one can set foot in
very earnest upon the pavement these people from the Tabard trod, under
the cathedral arches--looking after the tomb of the great Black Prince,
and the scene of the slaughter of Thomas à Becket. In that quaint old
town, too, are gables under which some of these story-tellers of the
Pilgrimage may have lodged; and (mingling old tales with new) there are
latticed casements out of which Agnes Wickfield may have looked, and
sidewalks where David Copperfield may have accommodated his boy-step
to the lounging pace of the always imminent Micawber. Yet it is in
the country outside and in scenes the poet loved best, that the aroma
of the Canterbury Tales will be caught most surely; and it is among
those picturesque undulations of land which lie a little westward of
Harbledown--upon the Rochester road, which winds among patches of wood,
and green stretches of grass and billowy hop-gardens, that the lover of
Chaucer will have most distinctly in his ear the jingle of the “bridel”
of the Monk, and in his eye the scarlet hosen and the wimple of the Wife
of Bath.
Yet these Canterbury Tales convey something in them and about them
beside delicacies; the host, who is master of ceremonies, throws mud
at a grievous rate, and with a vigorous and a dirty hand. Boccaccio’s
indecencies lose nothing of their quality in the smirched rhyme of the
Reeve’s tale;[52] the Miller is not presentable in any decent company,
and the Wife of Bath is vulgar and unseemly. There are others, to be
sure, and enough, who have only gracious and grateful speech put into
their mouths; and it is these we cherish. The stories, indeed, which
these pilgrims tell, are not much in themselves; stolen, too, the most
of them; stolen, just as Homer stole the current stories about Ajax and
Ulysses; just as Boccaccio stole from the _Gesta Romanorum_; just as
Shakespeare stole from the Cymric fables about King Lear and Cymbeline.
He stole; but so did everyone who could get hold of a good manuscript.
Imagine--if all books were in such form now, and MSS. as few and sparse
as then, what a range for enterprising authors! But Chaucer stole nothing
that he did not improve and make his own by the beauties he added.
Take that old slight legend (everywhere current in the north of England)
of the little Christian boy, who was murdered by Jews, because he sang
songs in honor of the Virgin; and who--after death--still sang, and so
discovered his murderers. It is a bare rag of story, with only streaks of
blood-red in it; yet how tenderly touched, and how pathetically told, in
Chaucer’s tale of the Prioress!
It is a widow’s son--“sevene yeres of age”--and wheresoe’er he saw the
image
Of Christe’s moder, had he in usage,
As him was taught, to knele adown and say
His _Ave Marie!_ as he goth by the way.
Thus hath this widowe hire litel son y-taught
To worship aye, and he forgat it naughte.
And the “litel” fellow, with his quick ear, hears at school some day the
_Alma Redemptoris_ sung; and he asks what the beautiful song may mean? He
says he will learn it before Christmas, that he may say it to his “moder
dere.” His fellows help him word by word--line by line--till he gets it
on his tongue:
From word to word, acording with the note,
Twiës a day, it passed thro’ his throte.
At last he has it trippingly; so--schoolward and homeward,
as he cam to and fro
Full merrily than would he sing and crie,
O _Alma Redemptoris_ ever mó,
The sweetnesse hath his hertë perced so.
Through the Jews’ quarter he goes one day, singing this sweet song that
bubbles from him as he walks; and they--set on by Satan, who “hath in
Jewe’s herte his waspës nest”--conspire and plot, and lay hold on him,
and cut his throat, and cast him into a pit.
But--a wonder--a miracle!--still from the bleeding throat, even when life
is gone, comes the tender song, “_O Alma Redemptoris!_” And the wretched
mother, wandering and wailing, is led by the sweet, plaintive echoes,
whose tones she knows, to where her poor boy lies dead; and even as she
comes, he, with throte y-carven, his
_Alma Redemptoris_ gan to sing
So loude that al the placë gan to ring.
Then the Christian people take him up, and bear him away to the Abbey.
His mother lies swooning by the bier. They hang those wicked Jews--and
prepare the little body for burial and sprinkle it with holy water; but
still from the poor bleeding throat comes “evermo’” the song:
_O Alma Redemptoris mater!_
And the good Abbot entreats him to say, why his soul lingers, with his
throat thus all agape?
“My throte is cut unto my nekkë bone,”
Saidë this child, “and as by way of kynde,
I should have dyed, ye longë time agone,
But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookës finde,
Wol that his glory laste, and be in minde,
And for the worship of his moder dere,
Yet may I sing, ‘_O Alma!_’ loud and clere.”
But he says that as he received his death-blow, the Virgin came, and
“Methoughte she leyde a greyn upon my tongue,
Wherefore I singe and singe; I mote certeyn
Til from my tonge off-taken is the greyn;
And after that, thus saidë she to me,
‘My litel child, then wol I fecchen thee!’”
[Where at] This holy monk--this Abbot--him mene I,
His tonge out-caughte, and tok away the greyn,
And he gaf up the goost full softëly.
…
And when the Abbot had this wonder sein
His saltë teres trillëd adown as raine,
And graf he fell, all platt upon the grounde,
And stille he lay as he had been y-bounde.
After this they take away the boy-martyr from off his bier--
And in a tombe of marble stonës clere
Enclosen they his litel body swete;
Ther he is now: God leve us for to mete!
How tenderly the words all match to the delicate meaning! This delightful
poet knows every finest resource of language: he subdues and trails after
him all its harmonies. No grimalkin stretching out silken paws touches so
lightly what he wants only to touch; no cat with sharpest claws clings
so tenaciously to what he would grip with his earnester words. He is a
painter whose technique is never at fault--whose art is an instinct.
Yet--it must be said--there is no grand horizon at the back of his
pictures: pleasant May-mornings and green meadows a plenty; pathetic
episodes, most beguiling tracery of incidents and of character, but never
strong, passionate outbursts showing profound capacity for measurement
of deepest emotion. We cannot think of him as telling with any adequate
force the story of King Lear, in his delirium of wrath: Macbeth’s stride
and hushed madness and bated breath could not come into the charming,
mellifluous rhythm of Chaucer’s most tragic story without making a
dissonance that would be screaming.
But his descriptions of all country things are garden-sweet. He touches
the daisies and the roses with tints that keep them always in freshest,
virgin, dewy bloom; and he fetches the forest to our eye with words that
are brim-full of the odors of the woods and of the waving of green boughs.
* * * * *
In our next talk we shall speak of some who sang beside him, and of some
who followed; but of these not one had so rare a language, and not one
had so true an eye.