There are few things more melancholy than the spectacle of literary
fossilization. A great writer comes into being, lives, labours and dies.
Time passes; year by year the sediment of muddy comment and criticism
thickens round the great man’s bones. The sediment sets firm; what was
once a living organism becomes a thing of marble. On the attainment of
total fossilization the great man has become a classic. It becomes
increasingly difficult for the members of each succeeding generation to
remember that the stony objects which fill the museum cases were once
alive. It is often a work of considerable labour to reconstruct the
living animal from the fossil shape. But the trouble is generally worth
taking. And in no case is it more worth while than in Chaucer’s.
With Chaucer the ordinary fossilizing process, to which every classical
author is subject, has been complicated by the petrifaction of his
language. Five hundred years have almost sufficed to turn the most
living of poets into a substitute on the modern sides of schools for the
mental gymnastic of Latin and Greek. Prophetically, Chaucer saw the fate
that awaited him and appealed against his doom:
Ye know eke that, in form of speech is change
Within a thousand year, and wordes tho
That hadden price, now wonder nice and strange
Us thinketh them; and yet they spake them so,
And sped as well in love as men now do.
The body of his poetry may have grown old, but its spirit is still young
and immortal. To know that spirit—and not to know it is to ignore
something that is of unique importance in the history of our
literature—it is necessary to make the effort of becoming familiar with
the body it informs and gives life to. The antique language and
versification, so “wonder nice and strange” to our ears, are obstacles
in the path of most of those who read for pleasure’s sake (not that any
reader worthy of the name ever reads for anything else but pleasure); to
the pedants they are an end in themselves. Theirs is the carcass, but
not the soul. Between those who are daunted by his superficial
difficulties and those who take too much delight in them Chaucer finds
but few sympathetic readers. I hope in these pages to be able to give a
few of the reasons that make Chaucer so well worth reading.
Chaucer’s art is, by its very largeness and objectiveness, extremely
difficult to subject to critical analysis. Confronted by it, Dryden
could only exclaim, “Here is God’s plenty!”—and the exclamation proves,
when all is said, to be the most adequate and satisfying of all
criticisms. All that the critic can hope to do is to expand and to
illustrate Dryden’s exemplary brevity.
“God’s plenty!”—the phrase is a peculiarly happy one. It calls up a
vision of the prodigal earth, of harvest fields, of innumerable beasts
and birds, of teeming life. And it is in the heart of this living and
material world of Nature that Chaucer lives. He is the poet of earth,
supremely content to walk, desiring no wings. Many English poets have
loved the earth for the sake of something—a dream, a reality, call it
which you will—that lies behind it. But there have been few, and, except
for Chaucer, no poets of greatness, who have been in love with earth for
its own sake, with Nature in the sense of something inevitably material,
something that is the opposite of the supernatural. Supreme over
everything in this world he sees the natural order, the “law of kind,”
as he calls it. The teachings of most of the great prophets and poets
are simply protests against the law of kind. Chaucer does not protest,
he accepts. It is precisely this acceptance that makes him unique among
English poets. He does not go to Nature as the symbol of some further
spiritual reality; hills, flowers, sea, and clouds are not, for him,
transparencies through which the workings of a great soul are visible.
No, they are opaque; he likes them for what they are, things pleasant
and beautiful, and not the less delicious because they are definitely of
the earth earthy. Human beings, in the same way, he takes as he finds,
noble and beastish, but, on the whole, wonderfully decent. He has none
of that strong ethical bias which is usually to be found in the English
mind. He is not horrified by the behaviour of his fellow-beings, and he
has no desire to reform them. Their characters, their motives interest
him, and he stands looking on at them, a happy spectator. This serenity
of detachment, this placid acceptance of things and people as they are,
is emphasized if we compare the poetry of Chaucer with that of his
contemporary, Langland, or whoever it was that wrote _Piers Plowman_.
The historians tell us that the later years of the fourteenth century
were among the most disagreeable periods of our national history.
English prosperity was at a very low ebb. The Black Death had
exterminated nearly a third of the working population of the islands, a
fact which, aggravated by the frenzied legislation of the Government,
had led to the unprecedented labour troubles that culminated in the
peasants’ revolt. Clerical corruption and lawlessness were rife. All
things considered, even our own age is preferable to that in which
Chaucer lived. Langland does not spare denunciation; he is appalled by
the wickedness about him, scandalized at the openly confessed vices that
have almost ceased to pay to virtue the tribute of hypocrisy.
Indignation is the inspiration of _Piers Plowman_, the righteous
indignation of the prophet. But to read Chaucer one would imagine that
there was nothing in fourteenth-century England to be indignant about.
It is true that the Pardoner, the Friar, the Shipman, the Miller, and,
in fact, most of the Canterbury pilgrims are rogues and scoundrels; but,
then, they are such “merry harlots” too. It is true that the Monk
prefers hunting to praying, that, in these latter days when fairies are
no more, “there is none other incubus” but the friar, that “purse is the
Archdeacon’s hell,” and the Summoner a villain of the first magnitude;
but Chaucer can only regard these things as primarily humorous. The fact
of people not practising what they preach is an unfailing source of
amusement to him. Where Langland cries aloud in anger, threatening the
world with hell-fire, Chaucer looks on and smiles. To the great
political crisis of his time he makes but one reference, and that a
comic one:
So hideous was the noyse, ah _benedicite_!
Certes he Jakke Straw, and his meyné,
Ne maden schoutes never half so schrille,
Whan that they wolden eny Flemyng kille,
As thilke day was mad upon the fox.
Peasants may revolt, priests break their vows, lawyers lie and cheat,
and the world in general indulge its sensual appetites; why try and
prevent them, why protest? After all, they are all simply being natural,
they are all following the law of kind. A reasonable man, like himself,
“flees fro the pres and dwelles with soothfastnesse.” But reasonable men
are few, and it is the nature of human beings to be the unreasonable
sport of instinct and passion, just as it is the nature of the daisy to
open its eye to the sun and of the goldfinch to be a spritely and
“gaylard” creature. The law of kind has always and in everything
dominated; there is no rubbing nature against the hair. For
God it wot, there may no man embrace
As to destreyne a thing, the which nature
Hath naturelly set in a creature.
Take any brid, and put him in a cage,
And do all thine entent and thy corrage
To foster it tendrely with meat and drynke,
And with alle the deyntees thou canst bethinke,
And keep it all so kyndly as thou may;
Although his cage of gold be never so gay,
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand fold,
Lever in a forest, that is wyld and cold,
Gon ete wormes, and such wrecchidnes;
For ever this brid will doon his busynes
To scape out of his cage when that he may;
His liberté the brid desireth aye ...
Lo, heer hath kynd his dominacioun,
And appetyt flemeth (banishes) discrescioun.
Also a she wolf hath a vilayne kynde,
The lewideste wolf that she may fynde,
Or least of reputacioun, him will sche take,
In tyme whan hir lust to have a make.
Alle this ensaumples tell I by these men
That ben untrewe, and nothing by wommen.
(As the story from which these lines are quoted happens to be about an
unfaithful wife, it seems that, in making the female sex immune from the
action of the law of kind, Chaucer is indulging a little in irony.)
For men han ever a licorous appetit
On lower thing to parforme her delit
Than on her wyves, ben they never so faire,
Ne never so trewe, ne so debonaire.
Nature, deplorable as some of its manifestations may be, must always and
inevitably assert itself. The law of kind has power even over immortal
souls. This fact is the source of the poet’s constantly expressed
dislike of celibacy and asceticism. The doctrine that upholds the
superiority of the state of virginity over that of wedlock is, to begin
with (he holds), a danger to the race. It encourages a process which we
may be permitted to call dysgenics—the carrying on of the species by the
worst members. The Host’s words to the Monk are memorable:
Allas! why wearest thou so wide a cope?
God give me sorwe! and I were a pope
Nought only thou, but every mighty man,
Though he were shore brode upon his pan (head)
Should han a wife; for all this world is lorn;
Religioun hath take up all the corn
Of tredyng, and we burel (humble) men ben shrimpes;
Of feble trees there cometh wrecchid impes.
This maketh that our heires ben so sclendere
And feble, that they may not wel engendre.
But it is not merely dangerous; it is anti-natural. That is the theme of
the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Counsels of perfection are all very well
when they are given to those
That wolde lyve parfytly;
But, lordyngs, by your leve, that am not I.
The bulk of us must live as the law of kind enjoins.
It is characteristic of Chaucer’s conception of the world, that the
highest praise he can bestow on anything is to assert of it, that it
possesses in the highest degree the qualities of its own particular
kind. Thus of Cressida he says:
She was not with the least of her stature,
But all her limbes so well answering
Weren to womanhood, that creature
Nas never lesse mannish in seeming.