Like Jovinian,
Fat as a whale, and walken as a swan.
The Pardoner describes his own preaching in these words:
Then pain I me to stretche forth my neck
And east and west upon the people I beck,
As doth a dove, sitting on a barn.
Very often, too, Chaucer derives his happiest metaphors from birds and
beasts. Of Troy in its misfortune and decline he says: Fortune
Gan pull away the feathers bright of Troy
From day to day.
Love-sick Troilus soliloquizes thus:
He said: “O fool, now art thou in the snare
That whilom japedest at lovés pain,
Now art thou hent, now gnaw thin owné chain.”
The metaphor of Troy’s bright feathers reminds me of a very beautiful
simile borrowed from the life of the plants:
And as in winter leavés been bereft,
Each after other, till the tree be bare,
So that there nis but bark and branches left,
Lieth Troilus, bereft of each welfare,
Ybounden in the blacke bark of care.
And this, in turn, reminds me of that couplet in which Chaucer compares
a girl to a flowering pear-tree:
She was well more blissful on to see
Than is the newe parjonette tree.
Chaucer is as much at home among the stars as he is among the birds and
beasts and flowers of earth. There are some literary men of to-day who
are not merely not ashamed to confess their total ignorance of all facts
of a “scientific” order, but even make a boast of it. Chaucer would have
regarded such persons with pity and contempt. His own knowledge of
astronomy was wide and exact. Those whose education has been as horribly
imperfect as my own will always find some difficulty in following him as
he moves with easy assurance through the heavens. Still, it is possible
without knowing any mathematics to appreciate Chaucer’s descriptions of
the great pageant of the sun and stars as they march in triumph from
mansion to mansion through the year. He does not always trouble to take
out his astrolabe and measure the progress of “Phebus, with his rosy
cart”; he can record the god’s movements in more general terms than may
be understood even by the literary man of nineteen hundred and
twenty-three. Here, for example, is a description of “the colde frosty
seisoun of Decembre,” in which matters celestial and earthly are mingled
to make a picture of extraordinary richness:
Phebus wox old and hewed like latoun,
That in his hoté declinacioun
Shone as the burned gold, with streames bright;
But now in Capricorn adown he light,
Where as he shone full pale; I dare well sayn
The bitter frostes with the sleet and rain
Destroyed hath the green in every yerd.
Janus sit by the fire with double beard,
And drinketh of his bugle horn the wine;
Beforn him stont the brawn of tusked swine,
And “_noel_” cryeth every lusty man.
In astrology he does not seem to have believed. The magnificent passage
in the _Man of Law’s Tale_, where it is said that
In the starres, clearer than is glass,
Is written, God wot, whoso can it read,
The death of every man withouten drede,
is balanced by the categorical statement found in the scientific and
educational treatise on the astrolabe, that judicial astrology is mere
deceit.
His scepticism with regard to astrology is not surprising. Highly as he
prizes authority, he prefers the evidence of experience, and where that
evidence is lacking he is content to profess a quiet agnosticism. His
respect for the law of kind is accompanied by a complementary mistrust
of all that does not appear to belong to the natural order of things.
There are moments when he doubts even the fundamental beliefs of the
Church:
A thousand sythes have I herd men telle
That there is joye in heaven and peyne in helle;
And I accorde well that it be so.
But natheless, this wot I well also
That there is none that dwelleth in this countree
That either hath in helle or heaven y-be.
Of the fate of the spirit after death he speaks in much the same style:
His spiryt changed was, and wente there
As I came never, I cannot tellen where;
Therefore I stint, I nam no divinistre;
Of soules fynde I not in this registre,
Ne me list not th’ opiniouns to telle
Of hem, though that they witten where they dwelle.
He has no patience with superstitions. Belief in dreams, in auguries,
fear of the “ravenes qualm or schrychynge of thise owles” are all
unbefitting to a self-respecting man:
To trowen on it bothe false and foul is;
Alas, alas, so noble a creature
As is a man shall dreaden such ordure!
By an absurd pun he turns all Calchas’s magic arts of prophecy to
ridicule:
So when this Calkas knew by calkulynge,
And eke by answer of this Apollo
That Grekes sholden such a people bringe,
Through which that Troye muste ben fordo,
He cast anon out of the town to go.
It would not be making a fanciful comparison to say that Chaucer in many
respects resembles Anatole France. Both men possess a profound love of
this world for its own sake, coupled with a profound and gentle
scepticism about all that lies beyond this world. To both of them the
lavish beauty of Nature is a never-failing and all-sufficient source of
happiness. Neither of them are ascetics; in pain and privation they see
nothing but evil. To both of them the notion that self-denial and
self-mortification are necessarily righteous and productive of good is
wholly alien. Both of them are apostles of sweetness and light, of
humanity and reasonableness. Unbounded tolerance of human weakness and a
pity, not the less sincere for being a little ironical, characterize
them both. Deep knowledge of the evils and horrors of this
unintelligible world makes them all the more attached to its kindly
beauty. But in at least one important respect Chaucer shows himself to
be the greater, the completer spirit. He possesses, what Anatole France
does not, an imaginative as well as an intellectual comprehension of
things. Faced by the multitudinous variety of human character, Anatole
France exhibits a curious impotence of imagination. He does not
understand characters in the sense that, say, Tolstoy understands them;
he cannot, by the power of imagination, get inside them, become what he
contemplates. None of the persons of his creation are complete
characters; they cannot be looked at from every side; they are
portrayed, as it were, in the flat and not in three dimensions. But
Chaucer has the power of getting into someone else’s character. His
understanding of the men and women of whom he writes is complete; his
slightest character sketches are always solid and three-dimensional. The
Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_, in which the effects are almost
entirely produced by the description of external physical features,
furnishes us with the most obvious example of his three-dimensional
drawing. Or, again, take that description in the Merchant’s tale of old
January and his young wife May after their wedding night. It is wholly a
description of external details, yet the result is not a superficial
picture. We are given a glimpse of the characters in their entirety:
Thus laboureth he till that the day gan dawe.
And then he taketh a sop in fine clarré,
And upright in his bed then sitteth he.
And after that he sang full loud and clear,
And kissed his wife and made wanton cheer.
He was all coltish, full of ragerye,
And full of jargon as a flecked pye.
The slacké skin about his necké shaketh,
While that he sang, so chanteth he and craketh.
But God wot what that May thought in her heart,
When she him saw up sitting in his shirt,
In his night cap and with his necké lean;
She praiseth not his playing worth a bean.
But these are all slight sketches. For full-length portraits of
character we must turn to _Troilus and Cressida_, a work which, though
it was written before the fullest maturity of Chaucer’s powers, is in
many ways his most remarkable achievement, and one, moreover, which has
never been rivalled for beauty and insight in the whole field of English
narrative poetry. When one sees with what certainty and precision
Chaucer describes every movement of Cressida’s spirit from the first
movement she hears of Troilus’ love for her to the moment when she is
unfaithful to him, one can only wonder why the novel of character should
have been so slow to make its appearance. It was not until the
eighteenth century that narrative artists, using prose as their medium
instead of verse, began to rediscover the secrets that were familiar to
Chaucer in the fourteenth.
_Troilus and Cressida_ was written, as we have said, before Chaucer had
learnt to make the fullest use of his powers. In colouring it is
fainter, less sharp and brilliant than the best of the _Canterbury
Tales_. The character studies are there, carefully and accurately worked
out; but we miss the bright vividness of presentation with which Chaucer
was to endow his later art. The characters are all alive and completely
seen and understood. But they move, as it were, behind a veil—the veil
of that poetic convention which had, in the earliest poems, almost
completely shrouded Chaucer’s genius, and which, as he grew up, as he
adventured and discovered, grew thinner and thinner, and finally
vanished like gauzy mist in the sunlight. When _Troilus and Cressida_
was written the mist had not completely dissipated, and the figures of
his creation, complete in conception and execution as they are, are seen
a little dimly because of the interposed veil.
The only moment in the poem when Chaucer’s insight seems to fail him is
at the very end; he has to account for Cressida’s unfaithfulness, and he
is at a loss to know how he shall do it. Shakespeare, when he re-handled
the theme, had no such difficulty. His version of the story, planned on
much coarser lines than Chaucer’s, leads obviously and inevitably to the
fore-ordained conclusion; his Cressida is a minx who simply lives up to
her character. What could be more simple? But to Chaucer the problem is
not so simple. His Cressida is not a minx. From the moment he first sets
eyes on her Chaucer, like his own unhappy Troilus, falls head over ears
in love. Beautiful, gentle, gay; possessing, it is true, somewhat
“tendre wittes,” but making up for her lack of skill in ratiocination by
the “sudden avysements” of intuition; vain, but not disagreeably so, of
her good looks and of her power over so great and noble a knight as
Troilus; slow to feel love, but once she has yielded, rendering back to
Troilus passion for passion; in a word, the “least mannish” of all
possible creatures—she is to Chaucer the ideal of gracious and courtly
womanhood. But, alas, the old story tells us that Cressida jilted her
Troilus for that gross prize-fighter of a man, Diomed. The woman whom
Chaucer has made his ideal proves to be no better than she should be;
there is a flaw in the crystal. Chaucer is infinitely reluctant to admit
the fact. But the old story is specific in its statement; indeed, its
whole point consists in Cressida’s infidelity. Called upon to explain
his heroine’s fall, Chaucer is completely at a loss. He makes a few
half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, and then gives it up,
falling back on authority. The old clerks say it was so, therefore it
must be so, and that’s that. The fact is that Chaucer pitched his
version of the story in a different key from that which is found in the
“olde bokes,” with the result that the note on which he is compelled by
his respect for authority to close is completely out of harmony with the
rest of the music. It is this that accounts for the chief, and indeed
the only, defect of the poem—its hurried and boggled conclusion.
I cannot leave Cressida without some mention of the doom which was
prepared for her by one of Chaucer’s worthiest disciples, Robert
Henryson, in some ways the best of the Scottish poets of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. Shocked by the fact that, in Chaucer’s poem,
Cressida receives no punishment for her infidelity, Henryson composed a
short sequel, _The Testament of Cresseid_, to show that poetic justice
was duly performed. Diomed, we are told, grew weary as soon as he had
“all his appetyte and mair, fulfillit on this fair ladie” and cast her
off, to become a common drab.
O fair Cresseid! the flour and _A per se_
Of Troy and Greece, how wast thow fortunait!
To change in filth all thy feminitie
And be with fleshly lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Grekis, air and late
So giglot-like.
In her misery she curses Venus and Cupid for having caused her to love
only to lead her to this degradation:
The seed of love was sowen in my face
And ay grew green through your supply and grace.
But now, alas! that seed with frost is slain,
And I fra lovers left, and all forlane.
In revenge Cupid and his mother summon a council of gods and condemn the
_A per se_ of Greece and Troy to be a hideous leper. And so she goes
forth with the other lepers, armed with bowl and clapper, to beg her
bread. One day Troilus rides past the place where she is sitting by the
roadside near the gates of Troy:
Then upon him she cast up both her een,
And with ane blenk it cam into his thocht,
That he some time before her face had seen,
But she was in such plight he knew her nocht,
Yet then her look into his mind it brocht
The sweet visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, one sometime his own darling.
He throws her an alms and the poor creature dies. And so the moral sense
is satisfied. There is a good deal of superfluous mythology and
unnecessary verbiage in _The Testament of Cresseid_, but the main lines
of the poem are firmly and powerfully drawn. Of all the disciples of
Chaucer, from Hoccleve and the Monk of Bury down to Mr. Masefield,
Henryson may deservedly claim to stand the highest.
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