LAST DAYS
"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life:
It sinks; and I am ready to depart."
W. S. LANDOR
From this time forward Chaucer seems to have lived from hand to mouth. He
had, as will presently be seen, a son, stepson, or foster-son of
considerable wealth and position; and no doubt he had other good friends
too. We have reason to believe that he was still working at the
"Canterbury Tales," and receiving such stray crumbs from great men's
tables as remained the main reward of literature until modern times. In
1391 (if we may judge from the fact that problems in the book are
calculated for that year) he wrote the "Treatise on the Astrolabe" for the
instruction of his ten-year-old son Lewis.[69] It was most likely in 1393
that he wrote from Greenwich the "Envoy" to his friend Henry Scogan, who
was then with the Court at Windsor, "at the stream's head of grace." The
poet urges him there to make profitable mention of his friend, "forgot in
solitary wilderness" at the lower end of the same river; and it is natural
to connect this with the fact that, in 1394, Richard granted Chaucer a
fresh pension of L20 a year for life. But the King's exchequer was
constantly empty, and we have seen that the poet's was seldom full; so we
need not be surprised to find him constantly applying for his pension at
irregular times during the rest of the reign. Twice he dunned his royal
patron for the paltry sum of 6_s._ 8_d._ More significant still is a
record of the Court of Common Pleas showing that he was sued by Isabella
Buckholt for the sum of L14. 1_s._ 11_d._ some time between April 24 and
May 20, 1398; the Sheriff of Middlesex reported that Chaucer had no
possessions in his bailiwick. On May 4 the poet obtained letters of
protection, in which the King alludes formally to the "very many arduous
and urgent affairs" with which "our beloved esquire" is entrusted, and
therefore takes him with "his men, lands, goods, rents, and all his
possessions" under the Royal protection, and forbids all pleas or arrests
against him for the next two years. The recital of these arduous and
urgent affairs is no doubt (like that of Chaucer's lands and rents) a mere
legal form; but the protection was real. Isabella Buckholt pressed her
suit, but the Sheriff returned in October, 1398, and June, 1399, that the
defendant "could not be found." Yet all this time Chaucer was visible
enough, for he was petitioning the King for formal letters patent to
confirm a grant already made by word of mouth in the preceding December,
of a yearly butt of wine from the Royal cellars "for God's sake, and as a
work of charity." This grant, valued at about L75 of modern money, was
confirmed on October 13, 1398, and was the last gift from Richard to
Chaucer. Before twelve months were gone, the captive King had ravelled out
his weaved-up follies before his pitiless accusers in the Tower of London;
and on the very 13th of October, year for year, on which Chaucer had
received his butt of wine from Richard II., a fresh poetical supplication
brought him a still greater favour from the next King. Henry IV. granted
on his own account a pension of forty marks in addition to Richard's; and
five days afterwards we find Chaucer pleading that he had "accidentally
lost" the late King's letters patent for the pension and the wine, and
begging for their renewal under Henry's hand. The favour was granted, and
Chaucer was thus freed from any uncertainty which might have attached to
his former grants from a deposed King, even though one of them was already
recognized and renewed in Henry's letters of October 13.[70]
"King Richard," writes Froissart, "had a greyhound called Math, who always
waited upon the king and would know no man else; for whensoever the king
did ride, he that kept the greyhound did let him loose, and he would
straight run to the king and fawn upon him and leap with his fore feet
upon the king's shoulders. And as the king and the earl of Derby talked
together in the court, the greyhound, who was wont to leap upon the king,
left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lancaster, and made
to him the same friendly countenance and cheer as he was wont to do to the
king. The duke, who knew not the greyhound, demanded of the king what the
greyhound would do. 'Cousin,' quoth the king, 'it is a great good token to
you and an evil sign to me.' 'Sir, how know you that?' quoth the duke. 'I
know it well,' quoth the king, 'the greyhound maketh you cheer this day as
king of England, as ye shall be, and I shall be deposed. The greyhound
hath this knowledge naturally; therefore take him to you; he will follow
you and forsake me.' The duke understood well those words and cherished
the greyhound, who would never after follow king Richard, but followed the
duke of Lancaster: [and more than thirty thousand men saw and knew
this."[71]] The fickle hound did but foreshadow the bearing of Richard's
dependents in general. The poem in which Chaucer hastened to salute the
new King of a few days breathed no word of pity for his fallen
predecessor, but hailed Henry as the saviour of England, "conqueror of
Albion," "very king by lineage and free election."[72] In the months that
followed, while Chaucer enjoyed his wine and his pension, the King who
first gave them was starving himself, or being starved by his gaolers, at
Pontefract. It must of course be remembered that, while Richard was felt
on all hands to have thrown his splendid chances wantonly away, Henry was
the son of Chaucer's best patron; and indeed the poet had recently been in
close relations with the future King, if not actually in his service.[73]
Still, we know that few were willing to suffer in those days for untimely
faith to a fallen sovereign, and we ourselves have less reason to blame
the many, than to thank the luckier stars under which such trials of
loyalty are spared to our generation. Chaucer's contemporary and
fellow-courtier, Froissart, might indeed write bitterly in his old age
about a people which could change its ruler like an old glove; but
Froissart was at ease in his fat canonry of Chimay; while Chaucer, with a
hundred poets before and since, had chirped like a cricket all through the
summer, and was now face to face with cold and starvation in the winter of
his life.
His own last poems invite us to pause here a moment; for they smack of old
age, infirmities, and disillusions. When he writes now of love, it is in
the tone of Wamba the Witless: "Wait till you come to forty year!" There
is the half-ironical ballad to Rosamond, a young beauty whom he must be
content to admire now from afar, yet upon whom he dotes even so--
Was never pike wallowed in galantine
As I in love am wallowed and y-bound.
Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most uncomplimentary in
the outspoken triumph-note of its close--
Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I never think to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean.
He may answer, and saye this or that;
I do no force, I speak right as I mean [I care no whit
_Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I never think to be in his prison lean_.
Love hath my name y-struck out of his slate,
And he is struck out my bookes clean
For evermore; there is none other mean.
_Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I never think to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean!_
Then we have "The Former Age"--a sigh for the Golden Past, and a tear for
the ungrateful Present--
Alas, alas! now may men weep and cry!
For in our days is nought but covetise
And doubleness, and treason, and envy,
Prison, manslaughter, and murder in sundry wise.[74]
Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning "This wretched
worldes transmutacioun"; a "Complaint of Venus"; the two begging epistles
to Scogan and Henry IV.; a satire against marriage addressed to his friend
Bukton; a piteous complaint entitled "Lack of Steadfastness," and two
moral poems on Gentilesse (true Gentility) and on Truth. The last of these
is not only the most truly poetical of them all, but also the bravest and
most resigned--
Flee from the press, and dwell with Soothfastness ...
That thee is sent, receive in buxomness [obedience
The wrestling for this world asketh a fall [requires, implies
Here is no home, here is but wilderness:
Forth, Pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!
Know thy countree, look up, thank God of all;
Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead,
And Truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread.
The bitter complaints against his own times which occur in these later
poems are of the ordinary medieval type; the courage and resignation are
Chaucer's own, and give a strangely modern ring to his words. He had
indeed reached a point of experience at which all centuries are drawn
again into closer kinship, just as early childhood is much the same in all
countries and all ages of the world. There is something in Chaucer's later
writings that reminds us of Renan's "pauvre ame develoutee de soixante
ans." All through life this shy, dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed
remarkable detachment from the history of his own times. Professor Raleigh
has pointed out that his avoidance of all but the slightest allusions to
even the greatest of contemporary events may well seem deliberate, however
much allowance we may make for the fact that the landmarks of history are,
in their own day, half overgrown by the common weeds of daily life. But,
for all his detachment and his shyness of autobiographical allusions,
there is one unmistakable contrast between his earliest and latest poems:
and we may clearly trace the progress from youthful enthusiasms to the old
man's disillusions. Yet there is no bitterness in Chaucer's old age; we
see in him what Ruskin calls "a Tory of the old school--Walter Scott's
school, that is to say, and Homer's"; loyal to monarchy and deeply
distrustful of democracy, yet never doubting the King's ultimate
responsibility to his people. We see his resignation to the transitory
nature of earthly happiness, even though he cannot quite forgive life for
its disappointments. His later ironies on the subject of love tell their
own tale. No man can mistake them for the jests of him that never felt a
wound; rather, we may see how the old scars had once bled and sometimes
burned still, though there was no reason why a man should die of them. He
anticipates in effect Heine's tragi-comic appeal, "Hate me, Ladies, laugh
at me, jilt me, but let me live!" For all that we have lost or missed, the
world is no mere vale of tears--
But, lord Christ! when that it remembreth me
Upon my youth, and on my jollity,
It tickleth me about mine hearte-root.
Unto this day it doth mine hearte boot
That I have had my world as in my time!
But Age, alas!----
well, even Age has its consolations--
The flour is gone, there is no more to tell,
The bran, as I best can, now must I sell!
There we have, in a couple of lines, the philosophy of Chaucer's later
years--to take life as we find it, and make the best of it. If he had
cared to take up the full burden of his time, there were plenty of themes
for tragedy. The world seemed to grow madder and madder as the 14th
century drew to its close; Edward III.'s sun had gone down in disgrace;
his grandson's brilliant infancy had passed into a childish manhood, whose
wayward extravagances ended only too naturally in the tragedy of
Pontefract; the Emperor Wenceslas was a shameless drunkard, and Charles
VI. of France a raving madman; Pope Urban VI. seemed half crazy, even to
his own supporters.[75] The Great Pestilence and the Papal Schism, the
Jacquerie in France, and the Peasants' Revolt in England, had shaken
society to its foundations; but Chaucer let all these things go by with
scarcely more than a shrug of his shoulders.
To the contemporary authors of Piers Plowman, and in a less degree to John
Gower, the world of that time was Vanity Fair in Bunyan's sense; a place
of constant struggle and danger, in which every honest pilgrim marches
with his back to the flames of the City of Destruction, marks their lurid
glare on the faces of the crowd, and sees the slightest gesture magnified
into shadows that reach to the very stars. To Chaucer the poet it was
rather Thackeray's Vanity Fair: a place where the greatest problems of
life may be brought up for a moment, but can only be dismissed as
insoluble; where humanity is far less interesting than the separate human
beings which compose it; where we eat with them, talk with them, laugh and
weep with them, yet play with them all the while in our own mind; so that,
when at last it draws towards sunset, we have no more to say than "come,
children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played
out." But behind and beneath Chaucer the poet was Chaucer the man, whose
last cry is recorded at the end of the "Canterbury Tales." Everything
points to a failure of his health for some months at any rate before his
death. The monks of Westminster were no doubt often at his bedside; and,
though he had evidently drifted some way from his early creed, we must
beware of exaggerations on this point.[76] Moreover, even if his
unorthodoxy had been far greater than we have any reason to believe, it
needed a temper very different from Chaucer's to withstand, under medieval
conditions, the terrors of the Unknown and the constant visitations of the
clergy. Indeed, it seems superfluous to offer any explanation or apology
for a document which is, on its face, as true a cry of the heart as the
dying man's instinctive call for his mother. "I beseech you meekly of God"
(so runs the epilogue to the "Parson's Tale") "that ye pray for me that
Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my guilts--and namely [especially]
of my translations and enditings of worldly vanities.... And many a song
and many a lecherous lay, that Christ for His great mercy forgive me the
sin ... and grant me grace of very penitence, confession and satisfaction
to do in this present life, through the benign grace of Him that is King
of Kings and Priest over all Priests, that bought us with the precious
blood of His heart; so that I may be one of them at the day of doom that
shall be saved."
But we are anticipating. The generosity of Henry IV., as we have seen, had
brought Chaucer once again into easy circumstances, and within a few weeks
we find him leasing from the Westminster Abbey "a tenement, with its
appurtenances, situate in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel," _i.e._
somewhere on the site of the present Henry VII.'s chapel, sheltered by the
south-eastern walls of the Abbey church, and "nigh to the White Rose
Tavern"; for in those days the Westminster precincts contained houses of
the most miscellaneous description, which all enjoyed the privilege of
sanctuary. Near this spot, in 1262, Henry III. had ordered pear trees to
be planted "in the herbary between the King's Chamber and the Church."[77]
"He that plants pears, plants for his heirs," says the old proverb; and it
is pleasant to believe that Chaucer enjoyed at least the blossom of this
ancient orchard, if not its fruit. He took the house at a rent of four
marks for as many of the next fifty-three years as his life might last;
but he was not fated to enjoy it for so many weeks. In February, 1400, he
drew an instalment of one of his pensions; in June another instalment was
paid through the hands of one William Somere; and then the Royal
accounts record no more. He died on October 25, according to the
inscription on his tomb, the first literary monument in that part of the
Abbey which has since received the name of Poet's Corner.[78] It is
probable that we owe this fortunate circumstance still more to the fact
that Chaucer was an Abbey tenant than to his distinction as courtier or
poet. When Gower died, eight years later, his body was laid just as
naturally among the Austin Canons of Southwark with whom he had spent his
last years.
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE IN THE 16TH CENTURY
(FROM VERTUE'S ENGRAVING OF AGGAS'S MAP)
(THE TWO-GABLED HOUSE JUST BELOW HENRY VII'S CHAPEL (E) MIGHT POSSIBLY BE
CHAUCER'S ACTUAL DWELLING)]
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY, AS SEEN FROM THE WINDOWS OF CHAUCER'S
HOUSE
(ON EXTREME RIGHT, PART OF HENRY VII'S CHAPEL, BUILT ON THE SITE OF ST.
MARY'S CHAPEL)]
The industry of Mr. Edward Scott has discovered that this same house in
St. Mary's Chapel garden was let, from at least 1423 until his death in
1434, to Thomas Chaucer, who was probably the poet's son. This Thomas was
a man of considerable wealth and position. He began as a _protege_ of John
of Gaunt, and became Chief Butler to Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V.
in succession; Constable of Wallingford Castle, and M.P. for Oxfordshire
in nine parliaments between 1402 and 1429. He was many times Speaker, a
commissioner for the marriage of Henry V., and an Ambassador to treat for
peace with France; fought at Agincourt with a retinue of twelve
men-at-arms and thirty-seven archers; became a member of the King's
Council, and died a very rich man. His only daughter made two very
distinguished marriages; and her grandson was that Earl of Lincoln whom
Richard III. declared his heir-apparent. For a while it seemed likely that
Geoffrey Chaucer's descendants would sit on the throne of England, but the
Earl died in fight against Henry VII. at Stoke. Of the poet's "little son
Lewis" we hear no more after that brief glimpse of his boyhood; and
Elizabeth Chaucy, the only other person whom we can with any probability
claim as Chaucer's child, was entered as a nun at Barking in 1381, John of
Gaunt paying L51 8_s._ 2_d._ for her expenses. It is just possible,
however, that this may be the same Elizabeth Chausier who was received as
a nun in St. Helen's priory four years earlier, at the King's nomination;
in this case the date would point more probably to the poet's sister.
This is not the place for any literary dissertation on Chaucer's poetry,
which has already been admirably discussed by many modern critics, from
Lowell onwards. He did more than any other man to fix the literary English
tongue: he was the first real master of style in our language, and
retained an undisputed supremacy until the Elizabethan age. This he owes
(as has often been pointed out) not only to his natural genius, but also
to the happy chances which gave him so wide an experience of society.
Living in one of the most brilliant epochs of English history, he was by
turns lover, courtier, soldier, man of business, student, ambassador,
Justice of the Peace, Member of Parliament, Thames Conservator, and
perhaps even something of an architect, if he took his Clerkship of the
Works seriously. All these experiences were mirrored in eyes as observant,
and treasured in as faithful a memory, as those of any other English poet
but one; and to these natural gifts of the born portrait-painter he added
the crowning quality of a perfect style. If his writings have been hailed
as a "well of English undefiled," it was because he spoke habitually, and
therefore wrote naturally, the best English of his day, the English of the
court and of the higher clergy. In this he was even more fortunate than
Dante, as he surpassed Dante in variety (though not in intenseness) of
experience, and as he knew one more language than he. When we note with
astonishment the freshness of Chaucer's characters across these five
centuries, we must always remember that his exceptional experience and
powers of observation were combined with an equally extraordinary mastery
of expression. It is because Chaucer's speech ranges with absolute ease
from the best talk of the best society, down to the Miller's broad
buffoonery or the north-country jargon of the Cambridge students, that his
characters seem to us so modern in spite of the social and political
revolutions which separate their world from ours. It will be my aim to
portray, in the remaining chapters, the England of that day in those
features which throw most light on the peculiarities of Chaucer's men and
women.