“‘Why wouldest thou be dead,’ these women cry,
‘Thou haddest gold enough--and Emily?’”
that follows so close upon the profoundly tender despair of Arcite’s
farewell:--
“What is this world? What asken men to have?
Now with his love now in the coldë grave
Alone withouten any company!”
The power of diffusion without being diffuse would seem to be the
highest merit of narration, giving it that easy flow which is so
delightful. Chaucer’s descriptive style is remarkable for its lowness of
tone,--for that combination of energy with simplicity which is among the
rarest gifts in literature. Perhaps all is said in saying that he has
style at all, for that consists mainly in the absence of undue emphasis
and exaggeration, in the clear uniform pitch which penetrates our
interest and retains it, where mere loudness would only disturb and
irritate.
Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion; but it is with a
quiet intensity of his own, that comes in as it were by accident.
“Upon a thickë palfrey, paper-white,
With saddle red embroidered with delight,
Sits Dido:
And she is fair as is the brightë morrow
That healeth sickë folk of nightës sorrow.
Upon a courser startling as the fire,
Æneas sits.”
Pandarus, looking at Troilus,
“Took up a light and found his countenance
As for to look upon an old romance.”
With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the description of it
that is the main object. His picturesque bits are incidental to the
story, glimpsed in passing; they never stop the way. His key is so low
that his high lights are never obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh
Hunt, and Keats in his “Endymion,” missing the nice gradation with which
the master toned everything down, become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds
one of him in the variety and natural action of his figures, is like him
also in the subdued brilliancy of his coloring. When Chaucer condenses,
it is because his conception is vivid. He does not need to personify
Revenge, for personification is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and
professional poets; but he embodies the very passion itself in a verse
that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard a stealthy tread
behind us:--
“The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.”[26]
And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative faculty in him
and Shakespeare! When the latter describes, his epithets imply always
an impression on the moral sense (so to speak) of the person who hears
or sees. The sun “flatters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye”; the
bending “weeds lacquey the dull stream”; the shadow of the falcon
“coucheth the fowl below”; the smoke is “helpless”; when Tarquin enters
the chamber of Lucrece “the threshold grates the door to have him
heard.” His outward sense is merely a window through which the
metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind passes over at once from the
simple sensation to the complex _meaning_ of it,--feels _with_ the
object instead of merely feeling it. His imagination is forever
dramatizing. Chaucer gives only the direct impression made on the eye or
ear. He was the first great poet who really loved outward nature as the
source of conscious pleasurable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the
return of spring; but with him it was a piece of empty ritualism.
Chaucer took a true delight in the new green of the leaves and the
return of singing birds,--a delight as simple as that of Robin Hood:--
“In summer when the shaws be sheen,
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the small birds’ song.”
He has never so much as heard of the “burthen and the mystery of all
this unintelligible world.” His flowers and trees and birds have never
bothered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings more like a bird than
any other poet, because it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he
ought to do so. He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness.
When we compare Spenser’s imitations of him with the original passages,
we feel that the delight of the later poet was more in the expression
than in the thing itself. Nature with him is only good to be
transfigured by art. We walk among Chaucer’s sights and sounds; we
listen to Spenser’s musical reproduction of them. In the same way, the
pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his stories has in itself the
effect of consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his
fancy with sympathetic interest. His best tales run on like one of our
inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon themselves
in eddies that dimple without retarding the current; sometimes loitering
smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a
pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily,
to float on the surface without breaking it into ripple. The vulgar
intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of foaming phrase, and
thinks nothing good for much that does not go off with a pop like a
champagne cork. The mellow suavity of more precious vintages seems
insipid: but the taste, in proportion as it refines, learns to
appreciate the indefinable flavor, too subtile for analysis. A manner
has prevailed of late in which every other word seems to be underscored
as in a school-girl’s letter. The poet seems intent on showing his
sinew, as if the power of the slim Apollo lay in the girth of his
biceps. Force for the mere sake of force ends like Milo, caught and held
mockingly fast by the recoil of the log he undertook to rive. In the
race of fame, there are a score capable of brilliant _spurts_ for one
who comes in winner after a steady pull with wind and muscle to spare.
Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his
excellence that he can be so inadequately sampled by detached
passages,--by single lines taken away from the connection in which they
contribute to the general effect. He has that continuity of thought,
that evenly prolonged power, and that delightful equanimity, which
characterize the higher orders of mind. There is something in him of the
disinterestedness that made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase is
never importunate. His simplicity is that of elegance, not of poverty.
The quiet unconcern with which he says his best things is peculiar to
him among English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thackeray have
approached it in prose. He prattles inadvertently away, and all the
while, like the princess in the story, lets fall a pearl at every other
word. It is such a piece of good luck to be natural! It is the good gift
which the fairy godmother brings to her prime favorites in the cradle.
If not genius, it is alone what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a
man have it not, he will never find it, for when it is sought it is
gone.
When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by one of those simple
and obvious epithets or qualities that are so easy to miss. Is it a
woman? He tells us she is _fresh_; that she has _glad_ eyes; that “every
day her beauty newed”; that
“Methought all fellowship as naked
Withouten her that I saw once,
As a coróne without the stones.”
Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar,
before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat. We know without
need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner. In some of
his early poems he sometimes, it is true, falls into the catalogue style
of his contemporaries; but after he had found his genius he never
particularizes too much,--a process as deadly to all effect as an
explanation to a pun. The first stanza of the “Clerk’s Tale” gives us a
landscape whose stately choice of objects shows a skill in composition
worthy of Claude, the last artist who painted nature epically:--
“There is at the west endë of Itaile,
Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold,
A lusty plain abundant of vitaile,
Where many a tower and town thou may’st behold
That founded were in time of fathers old,
And many another delítable sight;
And Sàlucës this noble country hight.”
The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape entangles the eye among the
obtrusive weeds and grass-blades of the foreground which, in looking at
a real bit of scenery, we overlook; but what a sweep of vision is here!
and what happy generalization in the sixth verse as the poet turns away
to the business of his story! The whole is full of open air.
But it is in his characters, especially, that his manner is large and
free; for he is painting history, though with the fidelity of portrait.
He brings out strongly the essential traits, characteristic of the genus
rather than of the individual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a
countenance that
“There wist no wight that he was e’er in debt,”
the Sergeant at Law, “who seemëd busier than he was,” the Doctor of
Medicine, whose “study was but little on the Bible,”--in all these cases
it is the type and not the personage that fixes his attention. William
Blake says truly, though he expresses his meaning somewhat clumsily,
“the characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose
all ages and nations. Some of the names and titles are altered by time,
but the characters remain forever unaltered, and consequently they are
the physiognomies and lineaments of universal human life, beyond which
Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter. As Newton numbered
the stars, and as Linnæus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the
classes of men.” In his outside accessaries, it is true, he sometimes
seems as minute as if he were illuminating a missal. Nothing escapes his
sure eye for the picturesque,--the cut of the beard, the soil of armor
on the buff jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of the eye.
But in this he has an artistic purpose. It is here that he
individualizes, and, while every touch harmonizes with and seems to
complete the moral features of the character, makes us feel that we are
among living men, and not the abstracted images of men. Crabbe adds
particular to particular, scattering rather than deepening the
impression of reality, and making us feel as if every man were a species
by himself; but Chaucer, never forgetting the essential sameness of
human nature, makes it possible, and even probable, that his motley
characters should meet on a common footing, while he gives to each the
_expression_ that belongs to him, the result of special circumstance or
training. Indeed, the absence of any suggestion of _caste_ cannot fail
to strike any reader familiar with the literature on which he is
supposed to have formed himself. No characters are at once so broadly
human and so definitely outlined as his. Belonging, some of them, to
extinct types, they continue contemporary and familiar forever. So wide
is the difference between knowing a great many men and that knowledge of
human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and not of observation
alone.
It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer’s satire so
kindly,--more so, one is tempted to say, than the panegyric of Pope.
Intellectual satire gets its force from personal or moral antipathy, and
measures offences by some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters
over a galling word, and it loves to say _Thou_, pointing out its victim
to public scorn. _Indignatio facit versus_, it boasts, though they might
as often be fathered on envy or hatred. But imaginative satire, warmed
through and through with the genial leaven of humor, smiles half sadly
and murmurs _We_. Chaucer either makes one knave betray another, through
a natural jealousy of competition, or else expose himself with a
_naïveté_ of good-humored cynicism which amuses rather than disgusts. In
the former case the butt has a kind of claim on our sympathy; in the
latter, it seems nothing strange if the sunny atmosphere which floods
that road to Canterbury should tempt anybody to throw off one disguise
after another without suspicion. With perfect tact, too, the Host is
made the _choragus_ in this diverse company, and the coarse jollity of
his temperament explains, if it does not excuse, much that would
otherwise seem out of keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples with
_him_.
Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely original of
poets, as much so in respect of the world that is about us as Dante in
respect of that which is within us. There had been nothing like him
before, there has been nothing since. He is original, not in the sense
that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought and said before, and
what nobody can ever think and say again, but because he is always
natural, because, if not always absolutely new, he is always
delightfully fresh, because he sets before us the world as it honestly
appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper to
certain people that it ought to appear. He found that the poetry which
had preceded him had been first the expression of individual feeling,
then of class feeling as the vehicle of legend and history, and at last
had wellnigh lost itself in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature
seemed to have passed through the natural stages which at regular
intervals bring it to decline. Even the lyrics of the _jongleurs_ were
all run in one mould, and the Pastourelles of Northern France had become
as artificial as the Pastorals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had
been made over into prose, and the _Melusine_ of his contemporary Jehan
d’Arras is the forlorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived thus far in
their decrepitude, the monks endeavored to give them a religious and
moral turn by allegorizing them. Their process reminds one of something
Ulloa tells us of the fashion in which the Spaniards converted the
Mexicans: “Here we found an old man in a cavern so extremely aged as it
was wonderful, which could neither see nor go because he was so lame and
crooked. The Father, Friar Raimund, said it were good (seeing he was so
aged) to make him a Christian; whereupon we baptized him.” The monks
found the Romances in the same stage of senility, and gave them a saving
sprinkle with the holy water of allegory. Perhaps they were only trying
to turn the enemy’s own weapons against himself, for it was the
free-thinking “Romance of the Rose” that more than anything else had
made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us that an allegory is to say
one thing where another is meant, and this might have been needful for
the personal security of Jean de Meung, as afterwards for that of his
successor, Rabelais. But, except as a means of evading the fagot, the
method has few recommendations. It reverses the true office of poetry by
making the real unreal. It is imagination endeavoring to recommend
itself to the understanding by means of cuts. If an author be in such
deadly earnest, or if his imagination be of such creative vigor as to
project real figures when it meant to cast only a shadow upon vapor; if
the true spirit come, at once obsequious and terrible, when the conjurer
has drawn his circle and gone through with his incantations merely to
produce a proper frame of mind in his audience, as was the case with
Dante, there is no longer any question of allegory as the word and thing
are commonly understood. But with all secondary poets, as with Spenser
for example, the allegory does not become of one substance with the
poetry, but is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures lose their
meaning, as they cease to be contemporary. It was not a style that could
have much attraction for a nature so sensitive to the actual, so
observant of it, so interested by it as that of Chaucer. He seems to
have tried his hand at all the forms in vogue, and to have arrived in
his old age at the truth, essential to all really great poetry, that his
own instincts were his safest guides, that there is nothing deeper in
life than life itself, and that to conjure an allegorical significance
into it was to lose sight of its real meaning. He of all men could not
say one thing and mean another, unless by way of humorous contrast.
In thus turning frankly and gayly to the actual world, and drinking
inspiration from sources open to all; in turning away from a colorless
abstraction to the solid earth and to emotions common to every pulse; in
discovering that to make the best of nature, and not to grope vaguely
after something better than nature, was the true office of Art; in
insisting on a definite purpose, on veracity, cheerfulness, and
simplicity, Chaucer shows himself the true father and founder of what is
characteristically _English_ literature. He has a hatred of cant as
hearty as Dr. Johnson’s, though he has a slier way of showing it; he has
the placid common-sense of Franklin, the sweet, grave humor of Addison,
the exquisite taste of Gray; but the whole texture of his mind, though
its substance seem plain and grave, shows itself at every turn
iridescent with poetic feeling like shot silk. Above all, he has an eye
for character that seems to have caught at once not only its mental and
physical features, but even its expression in variety of costume,--an
eye, indeed, second only, if it should be called second in some
respects, to that of Shakespeare.
I know of nothing that may be compared with the prologue to the
“Canterbury Tales,” and with that to the story of the “Chanon’s Yeoman”
before Chaucer. Characters and portraits from real life had never been
drawn with such discrimination, or with such variety, never with such
bold precision of outline, and with such a lively sense of the
picturesque. His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden and Goldsmith
have both tried their hands in emulation of him. And the humor also in
its suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy unobtrusiveness, is
something wholly new in literature. For anything that deserves to be
called like it in English we must wait for Henry Fielding.
Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated To-day as if it were as
good as Yesterday, the first who held up a mirror to contemporary life
in its infinite variety of high and low, of humor and pathos. But he
reflected life in its large sense as the life of _men_, from the knight
to the ploughman,--the life of every day as it is made up of that
curious compound of human nature with manners. The very form of the
“Canterbury Tales” was imaginative. The garden of Boccaccio, the
supper-party of Grazzini, and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough
thread for their stories, but exclude all save equals and friends,
exclude consequently human nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing
a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where all men are equal, with
souls to be saved, and with another world in view that abolishes all
distinctions. By this choice, and by making the Host of the Tabard
always the central figure, he has happily united the two most familiar
emblems of life,--the short journey and the inn. We find more and more
as we study him that he rises quietly from the conventional to the
universal, and may fairly take his place with Homer in virtue of the
breadth of his humanity.
In spite of some external stains, which those who have studied the
influence of manners will easily account for without imputing them to
any moral depravity, we feel that we can join the pure-minded Spenser in
calling him “most sacred, happy spirit.” If character may be divined
from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, hearty, temperate of
mind, more wise, perhaps, for this world than the next, but thoroughly
humane, and friendly with God and men. I know not how to sum up what we
feel about him better than by saying (what would have pleased most one
who was indifferent to fame) that we love him more even than we admire.
We are sure that here was a true brother-man so kindly that, in his
“House of Fame,” after naming the great poets, he throws in a pleasant
word for the oaten-pipes
“Of the little herd-grooms
That keepen beasts among the brooms.”
No better inscription can be written on the first page of his works than
that which he places over the gate in his “Assembly of Fowls,” and which
contrasts so sweetly with the stern lines of Dante from which they were
imitated:--
“Through me men go into the blissful place
Of the heart’s heal and deadly woundës’ cure;
Through me men go unto the well of Grace,
Where green and lusty May doth ever endure;
This is the way to all good aventure;
Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast,
All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast!”