_CHAUCER._
The new nation had its poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. By his origin, his
education, his tastes, his manner of life, as well as by his writings,
Chaucer represents the new age; he paints it from nature, and is a part
of it. His biography is scarcely less characteristic than his works, for
he describes nothing through hearsay or imagination. He is himself an
actor in the scenes he depicts; he does not dream, he sees them.
His history is a sort of reduction of that of the English people at that
day. They are enriched by trade, and Chaucer, the son of merchants,
grows up among them. The English people no longer repair to Paris in
order to study, and Chaucer does not go either; their king wages war in
France, and Chaucer follows Edward along the military roads of that
country; they put more and more trust in Parliament, and Chaucer sits in
Parliament as member for Kent. They take an interest in things of
beauty, they are fond of the arts, and want them to be all aglow with
ornamentation and bright with smiles; Chaucer is clerk of the king's
works, and superintends the repairs and embellishments of the royal
palaces. Saxon monotony, the sadness that followed after Hastings, are
forgotten past memory; this new England knows how to laugh and also how
to smile; she is a merry England, with bursts of joy, and also an
England of legends, of sweet songs, and of merciful Madonnas. The
England of laughter and the England of smiles are both in Chaucer's
works.
I.
Chaucer's life exactly fills the period we have now come to, during
which the English people acquired their definitive characteristics: he
was born under Edward III. and he died shortly after the accession of
Henry of Lancaster. At that time Petrarch and Boccaccio were long since
dead, France had no poet of renown, and Chaucer was without comparison
the greatest poet of Europe.
His family belonged to the merchant class of the City. His father, John
Chaucer, his uncle, Thomas Heyroun, and other relations besides, were
members of the Corporation of Wine Merchants, or Vintners. John Chaucer
was purveyor to the Court, and he accompanied Edward III. on his first
expedition to the Continent: hence a connection with the royal family,
by which the future poet was to profit. The Chaucers' establishment was
situated in that Thames Street which still exists, but now counts only
modern houses; Geoffrey was probably born there in 1340, or a little
earlier.[448]
Chaucer spent the years of his childhood and youth in London: a London
which the great fire of 1666 almost totally destroyed, that old London,
then quite young, of which illuminated manuscripts have preserved to us
the picturesque aspect. The paternal house was near the river, and by
the side of the streamlet called Walbrook, since covered over, but which
then flowed in the open air. On the noble river, the waters of which
were perhaps not as blue as illuminators painted them, but which were
not yet the liquid mud we all know, ships from the Mediterranean and the
Baltic glided slowly, borne by the tide. Houses with several stories and
pointed roofs lined the water, and formed, on the ground floor,
colonnades that served for warehouses, and under which merchandise was
landed.[449] The famous London Bridge, built under King John, almost new
still, for it was only entering upon its second century and was to live
six hundred years, with its many piers, its sharp buttresses, the houses
it bore, its chapel of St. Thomas, stood against the line of the
horizon, and connected the City with the suburb of Southwark. On that
side were more houses, a fine Gothic church, which still exists,
hostelries in abundance, for it was the place of arrival for those
coming by land; and with the hostelries, places of amusement of every
kind, a tradition so well established that most of the theatres in the
time of Elizabeth were built there, and notably the celebrated Globe,
where Shakespeare's plays were performed. Save for this suburb, the
right shore of the Thames, instead of the warehouses of to-day, offered
to view the open country, trees, and green meadows. Some way down, on
the left side, rose the walls of the Tower; and further up, towards the
interior of the City, the massive pile of St. Paul's stood out above the
houses. It was then a Gothic cathedral; Wren, after the great fire,
replaced it by the Renaissance edifice we see to-day. The town was
surrounded by walls, portions of which still remain, with Roman
foundations in some places.[450] At intervals gates opened on the
country, defended by bastions, their memory being preserved at this day
by names of streets: Aldgate, Bishopsgate, &c.
The town itself was populous and busy. The streets, in which Chaucer's
childhood was spent, were narrow, bordered by houses with projecting
stories, with signs overhanging the way, with "pentys" barring the
footpath, and all sorts of obstructions, against which innumerable
municipal ordinances protested in vain. Riders' heads caught in the
signs, and it was enjoined to make the poles shorter; manners being
violent, the wearing of arms was prohibited, but honest folk alone
conformed to the law, thus facilitating matters for the others;
cleanliness was but indifferent; pigs ran hither and thither. A decree
of the time of Edward I. had vainly prescribed that they should all be
killed, except those of St. Anthony's Hospital, which would be
recognised by the bell hanging at their neck: "And whoso will keep a
pig, let him keep it in his own house." Even this privilege was
withdrawn a little later, so elegant were manners becoming.[451]
In this laborious city, among sailors and merchants, acquiring a taste
for adventure and for tales of distant lands, hearing his father
describe the beautiful things to be seen at Court, Geoffrey grew up,
from a child became a youth, and, thanks to his family's acquaintances,
was appointed, at seventeen, page to Elizabeth, wife of Lionel, son of
Edward III.[452] In his turn, and not as a merchant, he had access to
the Court and belonged to it. He dressed in the fashion, and spent seven
shillings for a short cloak or paltock, shoes, and a pair of red and
black breeches.
In 1359 he took part in the expedition to France, led by the king. It
seemed as if it must be a death-blow to the French: the disaster of
Poictiers was not yet repaired; the Jacquerie had just taken place, as
well as the Parisian riots and the betrayal and death of Marcel; the
king of France was a prisoner in London, and the kingdom had for its
leader a youth of twenty-two, frail, learned, pious, unskilled in war.
It looked as though one had but to take; but once more the saying of
Froissart was verified; in the fragile breast of the dauphin beat the
heart of a great citizen, and the event proved that the kingdom was not
"so discomfited but that one always found therein some one against whom
to fight." The campaign was a happy one neither for Edward nor for
Chaucer. The king of England met with nothing but failures: he failed
before Reims, failed before Paris, and was only too pleased to sign the
treaty of Bretigny. Chaucer was taken by the French,[453] and his fate
would not have been an enviable one if the king had not paid his ransom.
Edward gave sixteen pounds to recover his daughter-in-law's page.
Everything has its value: the same Edward had spent fifty pounds over a
horse called Bayard, and seventy for another called Labryt, which was
dapple-grey.
After his return Chaucer was attached to the person of Edward in the
capacity of valet of the chamber, "valettus camerae regis"; this is
exactly the title that Moliere was later to honour in his turn. His
functions consisted in making the royal bed, holding torches, and
carrying messages. A little later he was squire, _armiger_, _scutifer_,
and as such served the prince at table, and rode after him in his
journeys.[454] His duties do not seem to have absorbed all his thoughts,
for he found time to read many books, to write many poems, to be madly
enamoured of a lovely unknown person who did not respond to his
passion,[455] to marry "Domicella" or "Damoiselle" Philippa, attached to
the service of the queen, then to the service of Constance, second wife
of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster--without ceasing however, because he
could not, as he assures us, do otherwise, still to love his unknown
beauty.[456]
He reads, he loves, he writes, he is a poet. We do not know whom he
loved, but we know what he read and what he wrote at that time. He read
the works which were in fashion in the elegant society he lived among:
romances of chivalry, love-songs, allegorical poems, from "Roland" and
"Tristan" to the "Roman de la Rose." Poets, even the greatest, rarely
show their originality at twenty, and Chaucer was no exception to the
rule; he imitated the writings best liked by those around him, which, at
the Court of the king, were mostly French books. However it might be
with the nation, the princes had remained French; the French language
was their native tongue; the beautiful books, richly illustrated, that
they kept to divert themselves with on dull days, in their
"withdrawing-room," or "chambre de retrait," were French books, of which
the subject for the most part was love. In this respect there was, even
at that time, no difference between the north and the south. Froissart
stays at Orthez, in 1388, with Monseigneur Gaston Phebus de Foix; and at
Eltham, at the Court of Richard II. in 1394. In each case he uses
exactly the same endeavours to please: both personages are men of the
same kind, having the same ideal in life, imbued with the same notions,
and representing the same civilisation. He finds them both speaking
French very well; Gaston "talked to me, not in his own Gascon, but in
fair and good French"; Richard, too, "full well spoke and read French."
The historian was duly recommended to each of them, but he relied
especially, to make himself welcome, on a present he had brought, the
same in both cases, a French manuscript containing amorous poems, which
manuscript "the Comte de Foix saw full willingly; and every night, after
his supper, I read to him from it. But in reading none durst speak nor
say a word; for he wanted me to be well heard."
He takes the same precautions when he goes to England, where he had not
been seen for a quarter of a century, and where he scarcely knew any one
now: "And I had beforehand caused to be written, engrossed and
illuminated and collected, all the amorous and moral treatises that, in
the lapse of thirty-four years, I had, by the grace of God and of Love,
made and compiled." He waits a favourable opportunity, and one day when
the councils on the affairs of State are ended, "desired the king to see
the book that I had brought him. Then he saw it in his chamber, for all
prepared I had it; I put it for him upon his bed. He opened it and
looked inside, and it pleased him greatly: and please him well it might,
for it was illuminated, written and ornamented and covered in scarlet
velvet, with ten silver nails gilded with gold, and golden roses in the
middle, and with two great clasps gilded and richly worked in the middle
with golden roses.
"Then the king asked me of what it treated, and I told him: of Love.
"With this answer he was much rejoiced, and looked inside in several
places, and read therein, for he spoke and read French full well; and
then had it taken by one of his knights, whom he called Sir Richard
Credon, and carried into his withdrawing-room, and treated me better and
better."[457]
Long before this last journey of the illustrious chronicler, Chaucer was
familiar with his poems, and he was acquainted, as most men around him
were, with those of his French contemporaries: Deguileville, Machault,
Des Champs, and later Granson.[458] He sings like them of love, of
spring, of the field-daisy[459]; he had read with passionate admiration
the poem, composed in the preceding century, which was most liked of
all the literature of the time, the "Roman de la Rose."
This famous poem was then at the height of a reputation which was to
last until after the Renaissance. The faults which deter us from it
contributed to its popularity as much as did its merits; digressions,
disquisitions, and sermons did not inspire the terror they do now;
twenty-three thousand lines of moralisation, psychological analysis,
abstract dissertations, delivered by personified abstractions, did not
weary the young imagination of the ancestors. The form is allegorical:
the rose is the maiden whom the lover desires to conquer: this form,
which fell later into disfavour, delighted the readers of the fourteenth
century for whom it was an additional pleasure to unriddle these easy
enigmas.
The Church had helped to bring allegories into vogue; commentators had
early explained the New Testament by the Old, one being an allegory of
the other: the adventure of Jonah and the whale was an allegory of the
resurrection; the Bestiaries were series of allegories; the litanies of
the Virgin lists of symbols. The methods of pious authors were adopted
by worldly ones; Love had his religion, his allegories, his litanies,
not to speak of his paradise, his hell, and his ten commandments. He had
a whole celestial court of personified abstractions, composed of those
tenuous and transparent beings who welcome or repel the lover in the
garden of the Rose. It was a new religion, this worship of woman,
unknown to the ancients; Ovid no longer sufficed, imitators could not
help altering his aim and ideal; the new cult required a gospel; that
gospel was the "Roman de la Rose."[460]
The discrepancies in the book did not shock the generality of readers;
art at that time was full of contrasts, and life of contradictions, and
the thing was so usual that it went unnoticed. Saints prayed on the
threshold of churches, and gargoyles laughed at the saints. Guillaume de
Lorris built the porch of his cathedral of Love, and placed in the
niches tall, long figures of pure and noble mien. Jean de Meun, forty
years later, continued the edifice, and was not sparing of gargoyles,
mocking, grotesque, and indecent. Thence followed interminable
discussions, some holding for Guillaume, others for Jean, some rejecting
the whole romance, others, the most numerous, accepting it all. These
dissensions added still more to the fame of the work, and it was so
popular that there exist more than two hundred manuscripts of it.[461]
The wise biographer of the wise king Charles V., Christina of Pisan,
protested in the name of insulted women: "To you who have beautiful
daughters, and desire well to introduce them to honest life, give to
them, give the Romaunt of the Rose, to learn how to discern good from
evil; what do I say, but evil from good! And of what utility, nor what
does it profit listeners to hear such horrible things?" The author
"never had acquaintance nor association with an honourable or virtuous
woman"; he has known none save those of "dissolute and evil life," and
has taken all the others to be according to that pattern.[462] The
illustrious Gerson, in the fifteenth century, did the romance the honour
of refuting it by a treatise according to rule; but the poem was none
the less translated into Latin, Flemish, and English, printed a number
of times at the Renaissance and rejuvenated and edited by Marot.
There were several English translations, and one of them was the work of
our young "Valettus camerae regis." This translation by Chaucer is
lost,[463] but we are aware not only that it existed, but even that it
was celebrated; its merit was known in France, and Des Champs, in
sending his works to Chaucer,[464] congratulates him, above all things,
on having "planted the rose-tree" in "the isle of giants," the "angelic
land," "Angleterre," and on being there the god of worldly loves:
Tu es d'amours mondains dieux on Albie
Et de la Rose en la terre Angelique ...
En bon angles le livre translatas.
This authority in matters of love which Des Champs ascribes to his
English brother-author, is real. Chaucer composed then a quantity of
amorous poems, in the French style, for himself, for others, to while
away the time, to allay his sorrows. Of them said Gower:
The lande fulfylled is over all.
Most of them are lost; but we know, from contemporaneous allusions, that
they swarmed, and from himself that he wrote "many an ympne" to the God
of love, "balades, roundels, virelayes,"
bokes, songes, dytees,
In ryme, or elles in cadence,
each and all "in reverence of Love."[465] A few poems, however, of that
early period, have reached us. They are, amongst others, his "Compleynte
unto Pite"--
Pite, that I have sought so yore ago
With herte sore, and ful of besy peyne ...
--a rough sketch of a subject that Sidney was to take up later and bring
to perfection, and his "Book of the Duchesse," composed on the occasion
of the death of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt.
The occasion is sad, but the setting is exquisite, for Chaucer wishes to
raise to the Duchess who has disappeared a lasting monument, that shall
prolong her memory, an elegant one, graceful as herself, where her
portrait, traced by a friendly hand, shall recall the charms of a beauty
that each morning renewed. So lovable was she, and so full of
accomplishment,
That she was lyk to torche bright,
That every man may take of light
Ynogh, and hit hath never the lesse.[466]
Already the descriptions have a freshness that no contemporaries equal,
and show a care for truth and a gift of observation not often found in
the innumerable poems in dream-form left to us by the writers of the
fourteenth century.
Tormented by his thoughts and deprived of sleep, the poet has a book
brought to him to while away the hours of night, one of those books that
he loved all his life, where "clerkes hadde in olde tyme" rhymed stories
of long ago. The tale, "a wonder thing" though it was, puts him to
sleep, and it seems to him that it is morning. The sun rises in a pure
sky; the birds sing on the tiled roof, the light floods the room, which
is all painted according to the taste of the Plantagenets. On the walls
is represented "al the Romaunce of the Rose"; the window-glass offers to
view the history of Troy; coloured rays fall on the bed; outside,
the welken was so fair,
Blew, bright, clere was the air ...
Ne in al the welken was a cloude.
A hunt goes by, 'tis the hunt of the Emperor Octavian; the young man
mounts and rides after it under those great trees, "so huge of
strengthe, so ful of leves," beloved of the English, amid meadows thick
studded with flowers,
As thogh the erthe envye wolde
To be gayer than the heven.
A little dog draws near; his movements are observed and noted with an
accuracy that the Landseers of to-day could scarcely excel. The dog
would like to be well received, and afraid of being beaten, he creeps up
and darts suddenly away:
Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres,
And leyde al smothe down his heres.
I wolde han caught hit, and anoon
Hit fledde and was fro me goon.
In a glade apart was a knight clothed in black, John of Lancaster.
Chaucer does not endeavour to console him; he knows the only assuagement
for such sorrows, and leads him on to speak of the dead. John recalls
her grace and gentleness, and praises qualities which carry us back to a
time very far from our own. She was not one of those women who, to try
their lovers, send them to Wallachia, Prussia, Tartary, Egypt, or
Turkey:
She ne used no suche knakkes smale.[467]
From these "knakkes smale" we may judge what the others must have been.
They discourse thus a long while; the clock strikes noon, and the poet
awakes, his head on the book which had put him to sleep.
II.
In the summer of 1370 Chaucer left London and repaired to the Continent
for the service of the king; this was the first of his diplomatic
missions, which succeeded each other rapidly during the ensuing ten
years. The period of the Middle Ages was not a period of _nuances_; that
_nuance_ which distinguishes an ambassador from a messenger was held as
insignificant, and escaped observation; the two functions formed but
one. "You," said Eustache Des Champs, "you, ambassador and messenger,
who go about the world to do your duty at the Courts of great princes,
your journeys are not short ones!... Don't be in such a hurry; your plea
must be submitted to council before an answer can be returned: just wait
a little more, my good friend; ... we must talk of the matter with the
chancellor and some others.... Time passes and all turns out
wrong."[468] Precedents are a great thing in diplomacy; here we find a
time-honoured one.
Recourse was often had to men of letters, for these mixed functions, and
they were filled by the most illustrious writers of the century,
Boccaccio in Italy, Chaucer in England, Des Champs in France. The
latter, whose career much resembles Chaucer's, has traced the most
lamentable pictures of the life led by an "ambassador and messenger" on
the highways of Europe: Bohemia, Poland, Hungary; in these regions the
king's service caused him to journey. His horse is half dead, and "sits
on his knees"[469]; the inhabitants have the incivility to speak only
their own language, so that one cannot even order one's dinner; you must
needs take what is served: "'Tis ill eating to another's appetite."[470]
The lodging is worse: "No one may lie by himself, but two by two in a
dark room, or oftener three by three, in one bed, haphazard." One may
well regret sweet France, "where each one has for his money what he
chooses to ask for, and at reasonable price: room to himself, fire,
sleep, repose, bed, white pillow, and scented sheets."[471]
Happily for Chaucer, it was in Flanders, France, and Italy that he
negotiated for Edward and Richard. In December, 1372, he traverses all
France, and goes to Genoa to treat with the doge of commercial matters;
then he repairs to Florence, and having thus passed a whole winter far
from the London fogs (which already existed in the Middle Ages), he
returns to England in the summer of 1373. In 1376 a new mission is
entrusted to him, this time a secret one, the secret has been well kept
to this day; more missions in 1377 and 1378. "On Trinity Sunday," 1376,
says Froissart, "passed away from this world the flower of England's
chivalry, my lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, in
the palace of Westminster by London, and was embalmed and put into a
leaden chest." After the obsequies, "the king of England made his
children recognise ... the young _damoisel_ Richard to be king after his
death." He sends delegates to Bruges to treat of the marriage of his
heir, aged ten, with "Madame Marie, daughter of the king of France"; in
February other ambassadors are appointed on both sides: "Towards Lent, a
secret treaty was made between the two kings for their party to be at
Montreuil-on-sea. Thus were sent to Calais, by the English, Messire
Guichard d'Angle, Richard Stury, and Geoffrey Chaucer."[472] The
negotiation failed, but the poet's services seem nevertheless to have
been appreciated, for in the following year he is again on the highways.
He negotiates in France, in company with the same Sir Guichard, now
become earl of Huntingdon; and again in Italy, where he has to treat
with his compatriot Hawkwood,[473] who led, in the most agreeable
manner possible, the life of a condottiere for the benefit of the Pope,
and of any republic that paid him well.
These journeys to Italy had a considerable influence on Chaucer's mind.
Already in that privileged land the Renaissance was beginning. Italy
had, in that century, three of her greatest poets: the one whom Virgil
had conducted to the abode of "the doomed race" was dead; but the other
two, Petrarch and Boccaccio, still lived, secluded, in the abode which
was to be their last on earth, one at Arqua, near Padua, the other in
the little fortified village of Certaldo, near Florence.
In art, it is the century of Giotto, Orcagna, and Andrew of Pisa.
Chaucer saw, all fresh still in their glowing colours, frescoes that
time has long faded. Those old things were then young, and what seems to
us the first steps of an art, uncertain yet in its tread, seemed to
contemporaries the supreme effort of the audacious, who represented the
new times.
Chaucer's own testimony is proof to us that he saw, heard, and learnt as
much as possible; that he went as far as he could, letting himself be
guided by "adventure, that is the moder of tydinges." He arrived without
any preconceived ideas, curious to know what occupied men's minds, as
attentive as on the threshold of his "Hous of Fame":
For certeynly, he that me made
To comen hider, seyde me,
I shulde bothe here et see,
In this place wonder thinges ...
For yit peraventure, I may lere
Some good ther-on, or sumwhat here,
That leef me were, or that I wente.[474]
He was thus able to see with his own eyes the admirable activity, owing
to which rose throughout Italy monuments wherein all kinds of
contradictory aspirations mingled, and which are nevertheless so
harmonious in their _ensemble_, monuments of which Giotto's campanile is
the type, wherein we still recognise the Middle Ages, even while we
foresee the Renaissance--with Gothic windows and a general aspect which
is classic, where the sentiment of realism and everyday life is combined
with veneration for antique art, where Apelles is represented painting a
triptych of Gothic shape. Pisa had already, at that day, its leaning
tower, its cathedral, its baptistery, the exterior ornamentation of
which had just been changed, its Campo Santo, the paintings of which
were not finished, and were not yet attributed to Orcagna. Along the
walls of the cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques
which inspired the Tuscan artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of
Phaedra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He
could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the
magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. At
Florence the Palazzo Vecchio, which was not yet called thus, was
finished; so were the Bargello, Santa-Croce, Santa-Maria-Novella.
Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the Lansquenets was
scarcely begun; the baptistery had as yet only one of its famous doors
of bronze; the cathedral disappeared under scaffoldings; the workmen
were busy with the nave and the apse. Giotto's campanile had been
finished by his pupil Gaddi, the Ponte Vecchio, which did not deserve
that name any better than the palace, had been rebuilt by the same
Gaddi, and along the causeway which continued it, through clusters of
cypress and olive trees, the road led up to San Miniato, all resplendent
with its marbles, its mosaics, and its paintings. On other ranges of
hills, amid more cypress and more olive trees, by the side of Roman
ruins, arose the church of Fiesole, and half-way to Florence waved in
the sunlight the thick foliage overshadowing the villa which, during the
great plague had sheltered the young men and the ladies of the
"Decameron."
The movement was a general one. Each town strove to emulate its
neighbour, not only on the battlefields, which were a very frequent
trysting-place, but in artistic progress; paintings, mosaics, carvings,
shone in all the palaces and churches of every city; the activity was
extreme. Giotto, who had his studio, his "botega," in Florence, worked
also at Assisi, Rome, and Padua. Sienna was covering the walls of her
public palace with frescoes, some figures of which resemble the
paintings at Pompeii.[475] An antique statue found within her territory
was provoking universal admiration, and was erected on the Gaia fountain
by the municipality; but the Middle Ages did not lose their rights, and,
the republic having suffered reverses, the statue fell into disgrace.
The god became nothing more than an idol; the marble was shattered and
carried off, to be treacherously interred in the territory of
Florence.[476]
The taste for collections was spreading; the commerce of antiquities
flourished in Northern Italy. Petrarch bought medals, and numbered among
his artistic treasures a Madonna of Giotto, "whose beauty," he says in
his will, "escaped the ignorant and enraptured the masters of the
art."[477] This brightening of the land was the result of concurring
wills, nor did it pass unobserved even then; towns enjoyed their
masterpieces, and, like young women, "se miraient en leur beaute."
Contemporaries did not leave to posterity the care of crowning the
great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to
encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a
tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of
Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its
pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a
network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove":
the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the honour
was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the "Divine Comedy" were
instituted in Florence, and the lecturer was Boccaccio.[479]
It was impossible that a mind, from infancy friendly to art and books,
should not be struck by this general expansion; the charm of this
literary springtime was too penetrating for Chaucer not to feel it; he
followed a movement so conformable to his tastes, and we have a proof of
it. Before his journeys he was ignorant of Italian literature; now he
knows Italian, and has read the great classic authors of the Tuscan
land: Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The remembrance of their works
haunts him; the "Roman de la Rose" ceases to be his main literary ideal.
He was acquainted with the old classics before his missions; but the
tone in which he speaks of them now has changed; to-day it is a tone of
veneration; one should kiss their "steppes." He expresses himself about
them as Petrarch did; it seems, so great is the resemblance, as if we
found in his verses an echo of the conversations they very likely had
together by Padua in 1373.[480]
In the intervals between his missions Chaucer would return to London,
where administrative functions had been entrusted to him. For twelve
years, dating from 1374, he was comptroller of the customs, and during
the ten first years he was obliged, according to his oath, to write the
accounts and to draw up the rolls of the receipts with his own hand: "Ye
shall swere that ... ye shall write the rolles by your owne hande
demesned."[481] To have an idea of the work this implies, one should
see, at the Record Office, the immense sheets of parchment fastened
together, one after the other, which constitute these rolls.[482] After
having himself been present at the weighing and verifying of the
merchandise, Chaucer entered the name of the owner, the quality and
quantity of the produce taxed, and the amount to be collected: endless
"rekeninges!" Defrauders were fined; one, John Kent, of London, having
tried to smuggle some wools to Dordrecht, the poet, poet though he was,
discovered the offence; the wools were confiscated and sold, and Chaucer
received seventy-one pounds four shillings and sixpence on the amount of
the fine John Kent had to pay.
Chaucer lived now in one of the towers under which opened the gates of
London. The municipality had granted him lodgings in the Aldgate
tower[483]; his friend the philosopher and logician, Ralph Strode, lived
in the same way in rooms above "Aldrichgate"[484]; both were to quit the
place at any moment if the defence of the town rendered it necessary.
Chaucer lived there twelve years, from 1374 to 1386. There, his labour
ended, he would come home and begin his _other life_, his poet's life,
reading, thinking, remembering. Then all he had known in Italy would
return to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, sonnets
of Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; he had brought back
wherewithal to move and to enliven "merry England" herself. Once more in
his tower, whither he returned without speaking to any one, "domb," he
says, "as any stoon," the everyday world was done with; his neighbours
were to him as though they had lived at the ends of earth[485]; his real
neighbours were Dante and Virgil.
He wrote during this period, and chiefly in his tower of Aldgate, the
"Lyf of Seinte Cecile," 1373; the "Compleynt of Mars," 1380; a
translation of Boethius in prose; the "Parlement of Foules;" "Troilus
and Criseyde," 1382; the "Hous of Fame," 1383-4; the "Legend of Good
Women," 1385.[486] In all these works the ideal is principally an
Italian and Latin one; but, at the same time, we see some beginning of
the Chaucer of the last period, who, having moved round the world of
letters, will cease to look abroad, and, after the manner of his own
nation, dropping in a large measure foreign elements, will show himself
above all and mainly an Englishman.
At this time, however, he is as yet under the charm of Southern art and
of ancient models; he does not weary of invoking and depicting the gods
of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted
as a chastisement on the damned, scandalises him no more than it did the
painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," reclining on her couch,
"a bed of golde," clothed in transparent draperies,
Right with a subtil kerchef of Valence,
Ther was no thikker cloth of no defence;
or with less draperies still:
I saw Beautee withouten any atyr[487];
or again:
Naked fleting in a see;
her brows circled with a "rose-garlond white and reed."[488] He calls
her to his aid:
Now faire blisful, O Cipris,
So be my favour at this tyme!
And ye, me to endyte and ryme
Helpeth, that on Parnaso dwelle
By Elicon the clere welle.[489]
His "Compleynt of Anelida" is dedicated to
Thou ferse god of armes, Mars the rede,
and to Polymnia:
Be favourable eek, thou Polymnia,
On Parnaso that, with thy sustres glade,
By Elicon, not fer from Cirrea,
Singest with vois memorial in the shade,
Under the laurer which that may not fade.[490]
Old books of antiquity possess for him, as they did for the learned men
of the Renaissance, or for Petrarch, who cherished a manuscript of Homer
without being able to decipher it, a character almost divine:
For out of olde feldes, as men seith,
Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;
And out of olde bokes, in good feith,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.[491]
Poggio or Poliziano could not have spoken in more feeling words.
Glory and honour, Virgil Mantuan,
Be to thy name![492]
exclaims he elsewhere. "Go, my book," he says to his "Troilus and
Criseyde,"
And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, Stace.[493]
Withal strange discrepancies occur: none can escape entirely the
influence of his own time. With Chaucer the goddess of love is also a
saint, "Seint Venus"; her temple is likewise a church: "This noble
temple ... this chirche." Before penetrating into its precincts, the
poet appeals to Christ:
"O Crist," thought I, "that art in blisse,
Fro fantom and illusioun
Me save!" and with devocioun
Myn yen to the heven I caste.[494]
This medley was inevitable; to do better would have been to excel the
Italians, and Dante himself, who places the Erinnyes within the circles
of his Christian hell, or Giotto, who made Apelles paint a triptych.
As for the Italians, Chaucer borrows from them, sometimes a line, an
idea, a comparison, sometimes long passages very closely translated, or
again the plot or the general inspiration of his tales. In the "Lyf of
Seinte Cecile" a passage (lines 36-51) is borrowed from Dante's
"Paradiso." The same poet is quoted in the "Parlement of Foules," where
we find a paraphrase of the famous "Per me si va"[495]; another passage
is imitated from the "Teseide" of Boccaccio; "Anelida and Arcite"
contains several stanzas taken from the same original; "Troilus and
Criseyde" is an adaptation of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; Chaucer
introduces into it a sonnet of Petrarch[496]; the idea of the "Legend of
Good Women" is borrowed from the "De claris Mulieribus" of Boccaccio.
Dante's journeys to the spirit-world served as models for the "Hous of
Fame," where the English poet is borne off by an eagle of golden hue.
In it Dante is mentioned together with the classic authors of antiquity.
Read:
On Virgil, or on Claudian,
Or Daunte.[497]
The eagle is not an invention of Chaucer's; it had already appeared in
the "Purgatorio."[498]
Notwithstanding the quantity of reminiscences of ancient or Italian
authors that recur at every page; notwithstanding the story of AEneas
related wholly from Virgil, the first lines being translated word for
word[499]; notwithstanding incessant allusions and quotations, the "Hous
of Fame"[500] is one of the first poems in which Chaucer shows forth
clearly his own personality. Already we see manifested that gift for
familiar dialogue which is carried so far in "Troilus and Criseyde," and
already appears that sound and kindly judgment with which the poet will
view the things of life in his "Canterbury Tales." Evil does not prevent
his seeing good; the sadness he has known does not make him rebel
against fate; he has suffered and forgiven; joys dwell in his memory
rather than sorrows; despite his moments of melancholy, his turn of mind
makes him an optimist at heart, an optimist like La Fontaine and
Addison, whose names often recur to the memory in reading Chaucer. His
philosophy resembles the "bon-homme" La Fontaine's; and several passages
in the "Hous of Fame" are like some of Addison's essays.[501]
He is modern, too, in the part he allots to his own self, a self which,
far from being odious ("le moi est haissable," Pascal said), is, on the
contrary, charming; he relates the long vigils in his tower, where he
spends his nights in writing, or at other times seated before a book,
which he reads until his eyes are dim in his "hermyte's" solitude.
The eagle, come from heaven to be his guide, bears him off where his
fancy had already flown, above the clouds, beyond the spheres, to the
temple of Fame, built upon an ice mountain. Illustrious names graven in
the sparkling rock melt in the sun, and are already almost illegible.
The temple itself is built in the Gothic style of the period, all
bristling with "niches, pinnacles, and statues," and
... ful eek of windowes
As flakes falle in grete snowes.[502]
There are those rustling crowds in which Chaucer loved to mix at times,
whose murmurs soothed his thoughts, musicians, harpists, jugglers,
minstrels, tellers of tales full "of weping and of game," magicians,
sorcerers and prophets, curious specimens of humanity. Within the
temple, the statues of his literary gods, who sang of the Trojan war:
Homer, Dares, and also the Englishman Geoffrey of Monmouth, "English
Gaufride," and with them, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian, and Statius. At
the command of Fame, the names of the heroes are borne by the wind to
the four corners of the world; a burst of music celebrates the deeds of
the warriors:
For in fight and blood-shedinge
Is used gladly clarioninge.[503]
Various companies flock to obtain glory; the poet does not forget the
group, already formed in his day, of the braggarts who boast of their
vices:
We ben shrewes, every wight,
And han delyt in wikkednes,
As gode folk han in goodnes;
And joye to be knowen shrewes ...
Wherfor we preyen yow, a-rowe,
That our fame swich be-knowe
In alle thing right as it is.[504]
As pressing as any, they urgently claim a bad reputation, a favour which
the goddess graciously grants them.
Elsewhere we are transported into the house of news, noisy and surging
as the public square of an Italian city on a day when "something" has
happened. People throng, and crush, and trample each other to see,
although there is nothing to see: Chaucer describes from nature. There
are assembled numbers of messengers, travellers, pilgrims, sailors, each
bearing his bag, full of news, full of lies:
"Nost not thou
That is betid, lo, late or now?"
--"No," quod the other, "tel me what."
And than he tolde him this and that,
And swoor ther-to that hit was sooth--
"Thus hath he seyd"--and "thus he dooth"--
"Thus shal hit be"--"Thus herde I seye"--
"That shal be found"--"That dar I leye."[505]
Truth and falsehood, closely united, form an inseparable body, and fly
away together. The least little nothing, whispered in secret in a
friend's ear, grows and grows, as in La Fontaine's fable:
As fyr is wont to quikke and go,
From a sparke spronge amis,
Til al a citee brent up is.[506]
III.
Heretofore Chaucer has composed poems of brightest hue, chiefly devoted
to love, "balades, roundels, virelayes," imitations of the "Roman de la
Rose," poems inspired by antiquity, as it appeared through the prism of
the Middle Ages. His writings are superior to those of his English or
French contemporaries, but they are of like kind; he has fine passages,
charming ideas, but no well-ordered work; his colours are fresh but
crude, like the colours of illuminations, blazons, or oriflammes; his
nights are of sable, and his meadows seem of sinople, his flowers are
"whyte, blewe, yelowe, and rede."[507] In "Troilus and Criseyde" we
find another Chaucer, far more complete and powerful; he surpasses now
even the Italians whom he had taken for his models, and writes the first
great poem of renewed English literature.
The fortunes of Troilus had grown little by little in the course of
centuries. Homer merely mentions his name; Virgil devotes three lines to
him; Dares, who has seen everything, draws his portrait; Benoit de
Sainte-More is the earliest to ascribe to him a love first happy, then
tragic; Gui de Colonna intermingles sententious remarks with the
narrative; Boccaccio develops the story, adds characters, and makes of
it a romance, an elegant tale in which young Italian noblemen, equally
handsome, youthful, amorous, and unscrupulous, win ladies' hearts, lose
them, and discourse subtly about their desires and their mishaps.[508]
Chaucer appropriates the plot,[509] transforms the personages, alters
the tone of the narrative, breaks the monotony of it, introduces
differences of age and disposition, and moulds in his own way the
material that he borrows, like a man now sure of himself, who dares to
judge and to criticise; who thinks it possible to improve upon a romance
even of Boccaccio's. The literary progress marked by this work is
astonishing, not more so, however, than the progress accomplished in
the same time by the nation. With the Parliament of Westminster as with
Chaucer's poetry, the real definitive England is beginning.
In Chaucer, indeed, as in the new race, the mingling of the origins has
become intimate and indissoluble. In "Troilus and Criseyde" the Celt's
ready wit, gift of repartee, and sense of the dramatic; the care for the
form and ordering of a narrative, dear to the Latin races; the Norman's
faculty of observation, are allied to the emotion and tenderness of the
Saxon. This fusion had been brought about slowly, when however the time
came, its realisation was complete all at once, almost sudden. Yesterday
authors of English tongue could only lisp; to-day, no longer content to
talk, they sing.
In its semi-epic form, the poem of "Troilus and Criseyde" is connected
with the art of the novel and the art of the drama, to the development
of which England was to contribute so highly. It is already the English
novel and drama where the tragic and the comic are blended; where the
heroic and the trivial go side by side, as in real life; where Juliet's
nurse interrupts the lovers leaning over the balcony of the Capulets,
where princesses have no confidants, diminished reproductions of their
own selves, invented to give them their cue; where sentiments are
examined closely, with an attentive mind, friendly to experimental
psychology; and where, nevertheless, far from holding always to subtile
dissertations, all that is material fact is clearly exposed to view, in
a good light, and not merely talked about. The vital parts of the drama
are all exhibited before our eyes and not concealed behind the scenes;
heroes are not all spirit, neither are they mere images; we are as far
from the crude illuminations of degenerate minstrels as from La
Calprenede's heroic romances; the characters have muscles, bones and
sinews, and at the same time, hearts and souls; they are real men. The
date of "Troilus and Criseyde" is a great date in English literature.
The book, like Froissart's collection of poems, treats "of love." It
relates how Criseyde, or Cressida, the daughter of Calchas, left in Troy
while her father returned to the Greek camp, loves the handsome knight
Troilus, son of Priam. Given back to the Greeks, she forgets Troilus,
who is slain.
How came this young woman, as virtuous as she was beautiful, to love
this youth, whom at the opening of the story she did not even know? What
external circumstances brought them together, and what workings of the
heart made them pass from indifference to doubts and anxieties, and then
to love? These two orders of thought are untwined simultaneously, on
parallel lines by Chaucer, that dreamer who had lived so much in real
life, that man of action who had dreamed so many dreams.
Troilus despised love, and mocked at lovers:
If knight or squyer of his companye
Gan for to syke, or lete his eyen bayten
On any woman that he coude aspye;
He wolde smyle, and holden it folye,
And seye him thus, "God wot she slepeth softe
For love of thee, whan thou tornest ful ofte."[510]
One day, in the temple, he sees Cressida, and his fate is sealed; he
cannot remove his gaze from her; the wind of love has swept by; all his
strength has vanished; his pride has fallen as the petals fall from a
rose; he drinks deep draughts of an invincible poison. Far from her, his
imagination completes what reality had begun: seated on the foot of his
bed, absorbed in thought, he once more sees Cressida, and sees her so
beautiful, depicted in outlines so vivid, and colours so glowing, that
this divine image fashioned in his own brain is henceforth the only one
he will behold; forever will he have before his eyes that celestial form
of superhuman beauty, never more the real earthly Cressida, the frail
daughter of Calchas. Troilus is ill for life of the love illness.
He has a friend, older than himself, sceptical, trivial, experienced,
"that called was Pandare," Cressida's uncle. He confides to him his
woes, and asks for help. Pandarus, in Boccaccio, is a young nobleman,
sceptical too, but frivolous, disdainful, elegant, like a personage of
Musset. Chaucer transforms the whole drama and makes room for the
grosser realities of life, by altering the character of Pandarus. He
makes of him a man of mature years devoid of scruples, talkative,
shameless, wily, whose wisdom consists in proverbs chosen among the
easiest to follow, much more closely connected with Moliere's or
Shakespeare's comic heroes than with Musset's lovers. Pandarus is as
fond of comparisons as Gros-Rene, as fond of old saws as Polonius; he is
coarse and indecent, unintentionally and by nature, like Juliet's
nurse.[511] He is totally unconscious, and thinks himself the best
friend in the world, and the most reserved; he concludes interminable
speeches by:
I jape nought, as ever have I joye.
Every one of his thoughts, of his words, of his attitudes is the very
opposite of Cressida's and her lover's, and makes them stand out in
relief by a contrast of shade. He is all for tangible and present
realities, and does not believe in ever foregoing an immediate and
certain pleasure in consideration of merely possible consequences.
With this disposition, and in this frame of mind, he approaches his
niece to speak to her of love. The scene, which is entirely of Chaucer's
invention, is a true comedy scene; the gestures and attitudes are
minutely noted. Cressida looks down; Pandarus coughs. The dialogue is so
rapid and sharp that one might think this part written for a play, not
for a tale in verse. The uncle arrives; the niece, seated with a book on
her knees, was reading a romance.
Ah! you were reading! What book was it? "What seith it? Tel it us. Is it
of Love?" It was of Thebes; "this romaunce is of Thebes;" she had
secured as it seems a very early copy. She excuses herself for indulging
in so frivolous a pastime; she would perhaps do better to read "on holy
seyntes lyves." Chaucer, mindful above all of the analysis of passions,
does not trouble himself about anachronisms; he cares nothing to know if
the besieged Trojans could really have drawn examples of virtue from the
Lives of the Saints; history matters little to him: let those who take
an interest in it look "in Omer or in Dares."[512] The motions of the
human heart, that is his real subject, not the march of armies; from the
moment of its birth, the English novel is psychological.
With a thousand precautions, and although still keeping to the vulgarity
of his role, Pandarus manages so as to bring to a sufficiently serious
mood the laughter-loving Cressida; he contrives that she shall praise
Troilus herself, incidentally, before he has even named him. With his
frivolities he mingles serious things, wise and practical advice like a
good uncle, the better to inspire confidence; then he rises to depart
without having yet said what brought him. Cressida's interest is excited
at once, the more so that reticence is not habitual to Pandarus; her
curiosity, irritated from line to line, becomes anxiety, almost anguish,
for though Cressida be of the fourteenth century, and the first of a
long line of heroines of romance, with her appears already the nervous
woman. She starts at the least thing, she is the most impressionable of
beings, "the ferfullest wight that might be"; even the state of the
atmosphere affects her. What is then the matter? Oh! only this:
... the kinges dere sone,
The goode, wyse, worthy, fresshe, and free,
Which alwey for to do wel is his wone,
The noble Troilus, so loveth thee,
That, bot ye helpe, it wol his bane be.
Lo, here is al, what sholde I more seye?
Do what yow list.[513]
The conversation continues, more and more crafty on the part of
Pandarus; his friend asks for so little: look less unkindly upon him,
and it will be enough.
But here appears Chaucer's art in all its subtilty. The wiles of
Pandarus, carried as far as his character will allow, might have
sufficed to make a Cressida of romance yield; but it would have been too
easy play for the master already sure of his powers. He makes Pandarus
say a word too much; Cressida unmasks him on the spot, obliges him to
acknowledge that in asking less he desired more for his friend, and now
she is blushing and indignant. Chaucer does not want her to yield to
disquisitions and descriptions; all the cleverness of Pandarus is there
only to make us better appreciate the slow inward working that is going
on in Cressida's heart; her uncle will have sufficed to stir her; that
is all, and, truth to say, that is something. She feels for Troilus no
clearly defined sentiment, but her curiosity is aroused. And just then,
while the conversation is still going on, loud shouts are heard, the
crowd rushes, balconies are filled, strains of music burst forth; 'tis
the return, after a victorious sally, of one of the heroes who defend
Troy. This hero is Troilus, and in the midst of this triumphal scene,
the pretty, frail, laughing, tender-hearted Cressida beholds for the
first time her royal lover.
In her turn she dreams, she meditates, she argues. She is not yet, like
Troilus, love's prisoner; Chaucer does not proceed so fast. She keeps
her vision lucid; her imagination and her senses have not yet done their
work and reared before her that glittering phantom, ever present, which
conceals reality from lovers. She is still mistress of herself enough to
discern motives and objections; she discusses and reviews elevated
reasons, low reasons, and even some of those practical reasons which
will be instantly dismissed, but not without having produced their
effect. Let us not make an enemy of this king's son. Besides, can I
prevent his loving me? His love has nothing unflattering; is he not the
first knight of Troy after Hector? What is there astonishing in his
passion for me? If he loves me, shall I be the only one to be loved in
Troy? Scarcely, for
Men loven wommen al this toun aboute.
Be they the wers? Why, nay, withouten doute.
Am I not pretty? "I am oon of the fayrest" in all "the toun of Troye,"
though I should not like people to know that I know it:
Al wolde I that noon wiste of this thought.
After all I am free; "I am myn owene woman"; no husband to say to me
"chekmat!" And "_par dieux!_ I am nought religious!" I am not a nun.
But right as whan the sonne shyneth brighte
In March that chaungeth ofte tyme his face
And that a cloud is put with wind to flighte
Which over-sprat the sonne as for a space,
A cloudy thought gan thorugh hir soule pace,
That over-spradde hir brighte thoughtes alle.[514]
Now she unfolds contradictory arguments supported by considerations
equally decisive; she is suffering from that _diboulia_ (alternate will)
familiar to lovers who are not yet thoroughly in love. There are two
Cressidas in her; the dialogue begun with Pandarus is continued in her
heart; the scene of comedy is renewed there in a graver key.
Her decision is not taken; when will it be? At what precise moment does
love begin? One scarcely knows; when it has come one fixes the date in
the past by hypothesis. We say: it was that day, but when that day was
the present day, we said nothing, and knew nothing; a sort of "perhaps"
filled the soul, delightful, but still only a perhaps. Cressida is in
that obscure period, and the workings within her are shown by the
impression which the incidents of daily life produce upon her mind. It
seems to her that everything speaks of love, and that fate is in league
against her with Pandarus and Troilus: it is but an appearance, the
effect of her own imagination, and produced by her state of mind; in
reality it happens simply that now the little incidents of life impress
her more when they relate to love; the others pass so unperceived that
love alone has a place. She might have felt anxious about herself if she
had discerned this difference between then and now; but the blindness
has commenced, she does not observe that the things appertaining to love
find easy access to her heart, and that, where one enters so easily, it
is usually that the door is open. She paces in her melancholy mood the
gardens of the palace; while she wanders through the shady walks, a
young girl sings a song of passion, the words of which stir Cressida to
her very soul. Night falls,
And whyte thinges wexen dimme and donne;
the stars begin to light the heavens; Cressida returns pensive; the
murmurs of the city die out. Leaning at her window, facing the blue
horizon of Troas, with the trees of the garden at her feet, and bathed
in the pale glimmers of the night, Cressida dreams, and as she dreams a
melody disturbs the silence: hidden in the foliage of a cedar, a
nightingale is heard; they too, the birds, celebrate love. And when
sleep comes, of what will she think in her dreams if not of love?
She is moved, but not vanquished; it will take yet many incidents; they
will all be small, trivial, insignificant, and will appear to her
solemn, superhuman, ordered by the gods. She may recover, at times,
before Pandarus, her presence of mind, her childlike laugh, and baffle
his wiles: for the double-story continues. Cressida is still able to
unravel the best-laid schemes of Pandarus, but she is less and less able
to unravel the tangled web of her own sentiments. The meshes draw
closer; now she promises a sisterly friendship: even that had been
already invented in the fourteenth century. She can no longer see
Troilus without blushing; he passes and bows: how handsome he is!
... She hath now caught a thorn;
She shal not pulle it out this next wyke.
God sende mo swich thornes on to pyke![515]
The passion and merits of Troilus, the inventions of
Pandarus, the secret good-will of Cressida, a thunderstorm which breaks
out opportunely (we know how impressionable Cressida is), lead to the
result which might be expected: the two lovers are face to face.
Troilus, like a sensitive hero, swoons: for he is extremely sensitive;
when the town acclaims him, he blushes and looks down; when he thinks
his beloved indifferent he takes to his bed from grief, and remains
there all day; in the presence of Cressida, he loses consciousness.
Pandarus revives him, and is not slow to perceive that he is no longer
wanted:
For ought I can espyen
This light nor I ne serven here of nought.
And he goes, adding, however, one more recommendation:
If ye ben wyse,
Swowneth not now, lest more folk aryse.[516]
What says Cressida?--What may "the sely larke seye" when "the sparhauk"
has caught it? Cressida, however, says something, and, of all the
innumerable forms of avowal, chooses not the least sweet:
Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte dere
Ben yolde, y-wis, I were now not here![517]
Were they happy?
But juggeth, ye that han ben at the feste
Of swich gladnesse.[518]
The gray morn appears in the heavens; the shriek of "the cok, comune
astrologer," is heard; the lovers sing their song of dawn.[519] All the
virtues of Troilus are increased and intensified by happiness; it is
the eternal thesis of poets who are in love with love.
The days and weeks go by: each one of our characters pursues his part.
Pandarus is very proud of his; what could one reproach him with? He does
unto others as he would be done by; he is disinterested; he has moreover
certain principles of honour, that limit themselves, it is true, to
recommending secrecy, which he does not fail to do. Can a reasonable
woman expect more?
Calchas and the Greeks claim Cressida, and the Trojans decide to give
her up. The unhappy young woman faints, but must needs submit. In an
excellent scene of comedy, Chaucer shows her receiving the
congratulations of the good souls of the town: so she is going to see
once more her worthy father, how happy she must be! The good souls
insist very much, and pay interminable visits.[520]
She goes, swearing to return, come what may, within ten days. The
handsome Diomedes escorts her; and the event proves, what experience
alone could teach, and what she was herself far from suspecting, that
she loved Troilus, no doubt, above all men, but likewise, and apart from
him, love. She is used to the poison, and can no longer do without it;
she prefers Troilus, but to return to him is not so easy as she had
thought, and to love or not to love is now for her a question of being
or being not. Troilus, who from the start had most awful presentiments,
feeling that, happen what may, his happiness is over, though yet not
doubting Cressida, writes the most pressing letters, and signs them in
French, "le vostre T." Cressida replies by little short letters (that
she signs "la vostre C."), in which she excuses herself for her brevity.
The length of a letter means nothing; besides she never liked to write,
and where she is now it is not convenient to do it; let Troilus rest
easy, he can count upon her friendship, she will surely return; true,
it will not be in ten days; it will be when she can.[521]
Troilus is told of his misfortune, but he will never believe it:
"Thou seyst nat sooth," quod he, "thou sorceresse!"
A brooch torn from Diomedes which he had given her on the day of
parting,
In remembraunce of him and of his sorwe,
allows him to doubt no more, and he gets killed by Achilles after a
furious struggle.
As we have drawn nearer to the catastrophe, the tone of the poem has
become more melancholy and more tender. The narrator cannot help loving
his two heroes, even the faithless Cressida; he remains at least
merciful for her, and out of mercy, instead of letting us behold her
near as formerly, in the alleys or on her balcony, dreaming in the
starlight, he shows her only from afar, lost among the crowd in which
she has chosen to mix, the crowd in every sense, the crowd of mankind
and the crowd of sentiments, all commonplace. Let us, he thinks,
remember only the former Cressida.
He ends with reflections which are resigned, almost sad, and he
contemplates with a tranquil look the juvenile passions he has just
depicted. Troilus, resigned too, beholds, from heaven, the field under
the walls of Troy, where he was slain, and smiles at the remembrance of
his miseries; and Chaucer, transforming Boccaccio's conclusion like all
the rest, addresses a touching appeal, and wise, even religious advice,
to you,
O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with your age.[522]
This return to seriousness is quite as noteworthy as the mixture of
everyday life, added by the poet to the idea borrowed from his model. By
these two traits, which will be seen again from century to century, in
English literature, Chaucer manifests his true English character; and if
we wish to see precisely in what consists the difference between this
temperament and that of the men of the South, whom Chaucer was
nevertheless so akin to, let us compare this conclusion with that of the
"Filostrato" as translated at the same time into French by Pierre de
Beauveau: "You will not believe lightly those who give you ear; young
women are wilful and lovely, and admire their own beauty, and hold
themselves haughty and proud amidst their lovers, for vain-glory of
their youth; who, although they be gentle and pretty more than tongue
can say, have neither sense nor firmness, but are variable as a leaf in
the wind." Unlike Chaucer, Pierre de Beauveau contents himself with such
graceful moralisation,[523] which will leave no very deep impression on
the mind, and which indeed could not, for it is itself as light as "a
leaf in the wind."
IV.
After 1379 Chaucer ceased to journey on the Continent, and until his
death he lived in England an English life. He saw then several aspects
of that life which he had not yet known from personal experience. After
having been page, soldier, prisoner of the French, squire to the king,
negotiator in Flanders, France, and Italy, he entered Westminster the
1st of October, 1386, as member of Parliament; the county of Kent had
chosen for its representatives: "Willielmus Betenham" and "Galfridus
Chauceres."[524] It was one of the great sessions of the reign, and one
of the most stormy; the ministers of Richard II. were impeached, and
among others the son of the Hull wool merchant, Michel de la Pole,
Chancellor of the kingdom. For having remained faithful to his
protectors, the king and John of Gaunt, Chaucer, looked upon with ill
favour by the men then in power, of whom Gloucester was the head, lost
his places and fell into want. Then the wheel of Fortune revolved, and
new employments offered a new field to his activity. At the end of three
years, Richard, having dismissed the Council which Parliament had
imposed upon him, took the authority into his own hands, and the poet,
soldier, member of Parliament, and diplomate, was appointed clerk of the
royal works (1389). For two years he had to attend to the constructions
and repairs at Westminster, at the Tower, at Berkhamsted, Eltham, Sheen,
at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and in many others of those castles
which he had described, with "pinacles, imageries, and tabernacles,"
and
ful eek of windowes
As flakes falle in grete snowes.[525]
His great literary occupation, during that time, was the composition of
his famous "Canterbury Tales."[526] Experience had ripened him; he had
read all there was to read, and seen all there was to see; he had
visited the principal countries where civilisation had developed: he had
observed his compatriots at work on their estates and in their
parliaments, in their palaces and in their shops. Merchants, sailors,
knights, pages, learned men of Oxford and suburban quacks, men of the
people and men of the Court, labourers, citizens, monks, priests, sages
and fools, heroes and knaves, had passed in crowds beneath his
scrutinising gaze; he had associated with them, divined them, and
understood them; he was prepared to describe them all.
On an April day, in the reign of Richard II., in the noisy suburb of
Southwark, the place for departures and arrivals, with streets bordered
with inns, encumbered with horses and carts, resounding with cries,
calls, and barks, one of those mixed troops, such as the hostelries of
that time often gathered together, seats itself at the common board, in
the hall of the "Tabard, faste by the Belle"[527]; the inns were all
close to each other. It was springtime, the season of fresh flowers, the
season of love, the season, too, of pilgrimages. Knights returned from
the wars go to render thanks to the saints for having let them behold
again their native land; invalids render thanks for their restoration to
health; others go to ask Heaven's grace. Does not every one need it?
Every one is there; all England.
There is a knight who has warred, all Europe over, against heathens and
Saracens. It was easy to meet them; they might be found in Prussia and
in Spain, and our "verray parfit gentil knight" had massacred enormous
numbers of them "at mortal batailles fiftene" for "our faith." Next to
him, a squire who had, like Chaucer, fought in France, with May in his
heart, a song upon his lips, amorous, elegant, charming, embroidered as
a meadow--"as it were a mede"--with white and red flowers; a stout
merchant, who looked so rich, was so well furred, and "fetisly" dressed
that
Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette;
a modest clerk, who had come from the young University of Oxford, poor,
patched, threadbare, with hollow cheeks, mounted on a lean horse, and
whose little all consisted in
Twenty bokes, clad in blak and reed;
an honest country franklin, with "sangwyn" visage and beard white "as is
the dayesye," a sort of fourteenth-century Squire Western, kindly,
hospitable, good-humoured, holding open table, with fish and roasts and
_sauce piquante_ and beer all day long, so popular in the county that,
Ful ofte tyme he was knight of the shire;
a shipman who knew every creek, from Scotland to Spain, and had
encountered many a storm, with his good ship "the Maudelayne,"
With many a tempest hadde his berd been shake;
a physician who had driven a thriving trade during the plague, learned,
and acquainted with the why and the wherefore of every disease,
Were it of hoot or cold, or moiste or drye;
who knew by heart Hippocrates and Galen, but was on bad terms with the
Church, for
His studie was but litel on the Bible.
With them, a group of working men from London, a haberdasher, a
carpenter, dyer, weaver, and cook; people from the country, a ploughman,
a miller,
His mouth as greet was as a great forneys,
a group of men-at-law devoured with cares, close shaven, bitter of
speech--
Ful longe were his legges, and ful lene,
Y-lyk a staf, ther was no calf y-sene--
bringing out their Latin on every occasion, terrible as adversaries, but
easy to win over for money, and after all, as Chaucer himself says, "les
meilleurs fils du monde":
A bettre felawe sholde men noght finde.
Then a group of Church-folk, men and women, of every garb and every
character, from the poor parish priest, who lives like a saint, obscure
and hidden, visiting, in rain and cold, the scattered cottages of his
peasants, forgetting to receive his tithes, a model of abnegation, to
the hunting monk, dressed like a layman, big, fat, with a head as shiny
as a ball, who will make one day the finest abbot in the world, to the
degenerate friar, who lives at the expense of others, a physician become
poisoner, who destroys instead of healing them, and to the pardoner, a
rascal of low degree, who bestows heaven at random by his own "heigh
power" on whoever will pay, and who manufactures precious relics out of
the pieces of his "old breech." Finally there are nuns, reserved, quiet,
neat as ermines, who are going to hear on the way enough to scandalise
them all the rest of their lives. Among them, Madame Eglantine, the
prioress, with her French of Stratford,
For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe,
who imitated the style of the Court, and, consequently,
Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe.
She was "so pitous" that she wept to see a mouse caught, or if one of
her little dogs died. Can one be more "pitous"?
All those personages there were, and many more besides. There was the
Wife of Bath, that incomparable gossip, screaming all the louder as she
was "som-del deef." There was the jovial host, Harry Bailey, used to
govern and command, and to drown with his brazen voice the tumult of the
common table. There is also a person who looks thoughtful and kindly,
who talks little but observes everything, and who is going to
immortalise the most insignificant words pronounced, screamed, grumbled,
or murmured by his companions of a day, namely, Chaucer himself. With
its adventurers, its rich merchants, its Oxford clerks, its members of
Parliament, its workmen, its labourers, its saints, its great poet, it
is indeed the new England, joyous, noisy, radiant, all youthful and full
of life, that sits down, this April evening, at the board of "the Tabard
faste by the Belle." Where are now the Anglo-Saxons? But where are the
last year's snows? April has come.
The characters of romance, the statues on cathedrals, the figures in
missals, had been heretofore slender or slim, or awkward or stiff;
especially those produced by the English. Owing to one or the other of
these defects, those representations were not true to nature. Now we
have, in an English poem, a number of human beings, drawn from the
original, whose movements are supple, whose types are as varied as in
real life, depicted exactly as they were in their sentiments and in
their dress, so that it seems we see them, and when we part the
connection is not broken. The acquaintances made at "the Tabard faste by
the Belle" are not of those that can be forgotten; they are life-long
remembrances.
Nothing is omitted which can serve to fix, to anchor in our memory, the
vision of these personages. A half-line, that unveils the salient trait
of their characters, becomes impossible to forget; their attitudes,
their gestures, their clothes, their warts, the tones of their voices,
their defects of pronunciation--
Somwhat he lipsed for his wantonnesse--
their peculiarities, the host's red face and the reeve's yellow one,
their elegances, their arrows with peacock feathers, their bagpipes,
nothing is left out; their horses and the way they ride them are
described; Chaucer even peeps inside their bags and tells us what he
finds there.
So the new England has its Froissart, who is going to tell feats of arms
and love stories glowing with colour, and take us hither and thither,
through highways and byways, giving ear to every tale, observing,
noting, relating? This young country has Froissart and better than
Froissart. The pictures are as vivid and as clear, but two great
differences distinguish the ones from the others: humour and sympathy.
Already we find humour well developed in Chaucer; his sly jests
penetrate deeper than French jests; he does not go so far as to wound,
but he does more than merely prick skin-deep; and in so doing, he
laughs silently to himself. There was once a merchant,
That riche was, for which men helde him wys.[528]
The "Sergeant of Lawe" was a busy man indeed:
No wher so bisy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he semed bisier than he was.
Moreover, Chaucer sympathises; he has a quivering heart that tears move,
and that all sufferings touch, those of the poor and those of princes.
The role of the people, so marked in English literature, affirms itself
here, from the first moment. "There are some persons," says, for his
justification, a French author, "who think it beneath them to bestow a
glance on what opinion has pronounced ignoble; but those who are a
little more philosophic, who are a little less the dupes of the
distinctions that pride has introduced into the affairs of this world,
will not be sorry to see the sort of man there is inside a coachman, and
the sort of woman inside a petty shopkeeper." Thus, by a great effort of
audacity, as it seems to him, Marivaux expresses himself in 1731.[529]
Chaucer, even in the fourteenth century, is curious to see the sort of
man a cook of London may be, and the sort of woman a Wife of Bath is.
How many wretches perish in Froissart! What blood; what hecatombs; and
how few tears! Scarcely here and there, and far apart, words absently
spoken about so much suffering: "And died the common people of hunger,
which was great pity."[530] Why lament long, or marvel at it? It is the
business and proper function of the common people to be cut to pieces;
they are the raw material of feats of arms, and as such only figure in
the narrative.
They figure in Chaucer's narrative, because Chaucer _loves_ them; he
loves his plowman, "a true swinker and a good," who has strength enough
and to spare in his two arms, and helps his neighbours for nothing; he
suffers at the thought of the muddy lanes along which his poor parson
must go in winter, through the rain, to visit a distant cottage. The
poet's sympathy is broad; he loves, as he hates, with all his heart.
One after another, all these persons of such diverse conditions have
gathered together, twenty-nine in all. For one day they have the same
object in view, and are going to live a common life. Fifty-six miles
from London is the shrine, famous through all Europe, which contains the
remains of Henry the Second's former adversary, the Chancellor Thomas
Becket, assassinated on the steps of the altar, and canonised.[531]
Mounted each on his steed, either good or bad, the knight on a beast
sturdy, though of indifferent appearance; the hunting monk on a superb
palfrey, "as broun as is a berye"; the Wife of Bath sitting astride her
horse, armed with great spurs and showing her red stockings, they set
out, taking with them mine host of the "Tabard," and there they go, at
an easy pace, along the sunny road lined with hedges, among the gentle
undulations of the soil. They will cross the Medway; they will pass
beneath the walls of Rochester's gloomy keep, then one of the principal
fortresses of the kingdom, but sacked recently by revolted peasantry;
they will see the cathedral built a little lower down, and, as it were,
in its shade. There are women and bad riders in the group; the miller
has drunk too much, and can hardly sit in the saddle; the way will be
long.[532] To make it seem short, each one will relate two tales, and
the troop, on its return, will honour by a supper the best teller.
Under the shadow of great romances, shorter stories had sprung up. The
forest of romance was now losing its leaves, and the stories were
expanding in the sunlight. The most celebrated collection was
Boccaccio's, written in delightful Italian prose, a many-sided work,
edifying and licentious at the same time, a work audacious in every way,
even from a literary point of view. Boccaccio knows it, and justifies
his doings. To those who reproach him with having busied himself with
"trifles," neglecting "the Muses of Parnassus," he replies: Who knows
whether I have neglected them so very much? "Perhaps, while I wrote
those tales of such humble mien, they may have come sometimes and seated
themselves at my side."[533] They bestowed the same favour on Chaucer.
The idea of "Troilus and Criseyde," borrowed from Boccaccio, had been
transformed; the general plan and the setting of the "Tales" are
modified more profoundly yet. In Boccaccio, it is always young noblemen
and ladies who talk: seven young ladies, "all of good family, beautiful,
elegant, and virtuous," and three young men, "all three affable and
elegant," whom the misfortunes of the time "did not affect so much as to
make them forget their amours." The great plague has broken out in
Florence; they seek a retreat "wherein to give themselves up to mirth
and pleasure"; they fix upon a villa half-way to Fiesole, now villa
Palmieri.
"A fine large court, disposed in the centre, was surrounded by
galleries, halls and chambers all ornamented with the gayest paintings.
The dwelling-house rose in the midst of meadows and magnificent gardens,
watered by cool streams; the cellars were full of excellent wines."
Every one is forbidden, "whencesoever he may come, or whatever he may
hear or see, to bring hither any news from without that be not
agreeable." They seat themselves "in a part of the garden which the
foliage of the trees rendered impenetrable to the sun's rays," at the
time when, "the heat being in all its strength, one heard nothing save
the cicadae singing among the olive-trees." Thanks to the stories they
relate to each other, they pleasantly forget the scourge which threatens
them, and the public woe; yonder it is death; here they play.