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.

Chaucer has chosen for himself a plan more humane, and truer to nature. It is not enough for him to saunter each day from a palace to a garden; he is not content with an alley, he must have a road. He puts his whole troop of narrators in motion; he stops them at the inns, takes them to drink at the public-houses, obliges them to hurry their pace when evening comes, causes them to make acquaintance with the passers-by. His people move, bestir themselves, listen, talk, scream, sing, exchange compliments, sometimes blows; for if his knights are real knights, his millers are real millers, who swear and strike as in a mill.

The interest of each tale is doubled by the way in which it is told, and even by the way it is listened to. The knight delights his audience, which the monk puts to sleep and the miller causes to laugh; one is heard in silence, the other is interrupted at every word. Each story is followed by a scene of comedy, lively, quick, unexpected, and amusing; they discuss, they approve, they lose their tempers; no strict rules, but all the independence of the high-road, and the unforeseen of real life; we are not sauntering in alleys! Mine host himself, with his deep voice and his peremptory decisions, does not always succeed in making himself obeyed. After the knight's tale, he would like another in the same style to match it; but he will have to listen to the miller's, which, on the contrary, will serve as a contrast. He insists; the miller shouts, he shouts "in Pilates vois," he threatens to leave them all and "go his wey" if they prevent him from talking. "Wel," says the host,

"Tel on, a devel wey! Thou art a fool, thy wit is overcome,"

What would Donna Pampinea and Donna Filomena have said, hearing such words?

At other times the knight is obliged to interfere, and then the tone is very different. He does not have to scream; a word from him is enough, and the storms are calmed. Moreover, the host himself becomes more gentle at times; this innkeeper knows whom he has to deal with; with all his roughness, he has a rude notion of differences and distances. His language is the language of an innkeeper; Chaucer never commits the fault of making him step out of his role; but the poet is too keen an observer not to discern _nuances_ even in the temper of a jovial host. One should see with what politeness and what salutations and what embarrassed compliments he informs the abbess that her turn has come to relate a story:

"My lady Prioresse, by your leve, So that I wist I sholde yow nat greve, I wolde demen that ye telle sholde A tale next, if so were that ye wolde. Now wol ye vouche-sauf, my lady dere?" --"Gladly," quod she, and seyde as ye shal here.

The answer is not less suitable than the request.

Thus, in these little scenes, we see, put into action, the descriptions of the prologue; the portraits step out of their frames and come down into the street; their limbs have become immediately supple and active; the blood courses through their veins; life fills them to the end of their fingers. No sooner are they on their feet than they turn somersaults or make courtesies; and by their words they charm, enliven, edify, or scandalise. Their personality is so accentuated that it makes them unmanageable at times; their temper rules them; they are not masters of their speech. The friar wants to tell a story, but he is so blinded by anger that he does not know where he is going; he stammers, he chokes, and his narrative remains shapeless; the pardoner is so closely bound to his profession that he cannot for a moment move out of it; shirt and skin make one, to use a familiar phrase of Montaigne's; his tale resembles a sermon, and he concludes as though he were in church:

Now, goode men, God forgeve yow your trespas ... I have relikes and pardon in my male As faire as any man in Engelond ... It is an honour to everich that is heer, That ye mowe have a suffisant pardoneer Tassoille yow, in contree as ye ryde, For aventures which that may bityde. Peraventure ther may falle oon or two Doun of his hors, and breke his nekke atwo. Look what a seuretee is it to yow alle That I am in your felaweship y-falle, That may assoille yow, bothe more and lasse, Whan that the soule shal fro the body passe. I rede that our hoste heer shal biginne, For he is most envoluped in sinne. Com forth sir hoste, and offre first anon, And thou shalt kisse the reliks everichon, Ye, for a grote! unbokel anon thy purs![534]

A most happy idea! Mine host makes a reply which cannot be repeated.

In other cases the personage is so wordy and impetuous that it is impossible to stop him, or set him right, or interrupt him; he cannot make up his mind to launch into his narrative; he must needs remain himself on the stage and talk about his own person and belongings; he alone is a whole comedy. One must perforce keep silence when the Wife of Bath begins to talk, irresistible gossip, chubby-faced, over-fed, ever-buzzing, inexhaustible in speech, never-failing in arguments, full of glee. She talks about what she knows, about her specialty; her specialty is matrimony; she has had five husbands, "three of hem were gode and two were badde;" the last is still living, but she is already thinking of the sixth, because she does not like to wait, and because husbands are perishable things; they do not last long with her; in her eyes the weak sex is the male sex. She is not going to break her heart about a husband who gives up the ghost; her conscience is easy; the spouse departs quite ready for a better world:

By God, in erthe I was his purgatorie, For which I hope his soule be in glorie.

Some praise celibacy, or reason about husbands' rights; the merry gossip will answer them. She discusses the matter thoroughly; sets forth the pros and cons; allows her husband to speak, then speaks herself; she has the best arguments in the world; her husband, too, has excellent ones, but it is she who has the very best. She is a whole _Ecole des Maris_ in herself.

The tales are of every sort,[535] and taken from everywhere. Chaucer never troubled himself to invent any; he received them from all hands, but he modelled them after his own fashion, and adapted them to his characters. They are borrowed from France, Italy, ancient Rome; the knight's tale is taken from Boccaccio, that of the nun's priest is imitated from the "Roman de Renart"; that of "my lord the monk" from Latin authors and from Dante, "the grete poete of Itaille." The miller, the reeve, the somnour, the shipman, relate coarse stories, and their licentiousness somewhat embarrasses the good Chaucer, who excuses himself for it. It is not he who talks, it is his road-companions; and it is the Southwark beer which inspires them, not he; you must blame the Southwark beer. The manners of the people of the lower classes, their loves, their animosities and their jealousies, are described to the life in these narratives. We see how the jolly Absolon goes to work to charm the carpenter's wife, who prefers Nicholas; he makes music under her windows, and brings her little presents; he is careful of his attire, wears "hoses rede," spreads out hair that shines like gold,

He kempte hise lokkes brode, and made him gay.

If on a feast-day they play a Mystery on the public place before the church, he gets the part of Herod allotted to him: who could resist a person so much in view? Alison resists, however, not out of virtue, but because she prefers Nicholas. She does not require fine phrases to repel Absolon's advances; village-folk are not so ceremonious:

Go forth thy wey, or I wol caste a ston.

Blows abound in stories of that kind, and the personages go off with "their back as limp as their belly," as we read in one of the narratives from which Chaucer drew his inspiration.

Next to these great scenes of noise there are little familiar scenes, marvellously observed, and described to perfection; scenes of home-life that might tempt the pencil of a Dutch painter; views of the mysterious laboratory where the alchemist, at once duped and duping, surrounded with retorts, "cucurbites and alembykes," his clothes burnt to holes, seeks to discover the philosopher's stone. They heat, they pay great attention, they stir the mixture;

The pot to-breketh, and farewel! al is go!

Then they discuss; it is the fault of the pot, of the fire, of the metal; it is just as I thought;

Som seyde, it was long on the fyr-making, Som seyde, nay! it was on the blowing.... "Straw," quod the thridde, "ye been lewede and nyce, It was nat tempred as it oghte be."

A fourth discovers a fourth cause: "Our fyr was nat maad of beech." What wonder, with so many causes for a failure, that it failed? We will begin over again.[536]

Or else, we have representations of those interested visits that mendicant friars paid to the dying. The friar, low, trivial, hypocritical, approaches:

"Deus hic," quod he, "O Thomas, freend, good day."

He lays down his staff, wallet, and hat; he takes a seat, the cat was on the bench, he makes it jump down; he settles himself; the wife bustles about, he allows her to, and even encourages her. What could he eat? Oh! next to nothing, a fowl's liver, a pig's head roasted, the lightest repast; his "stomak is destroyed;"

My spirit hath his fostring in the Bible.

He thereupon delivers to the sick man a long and interested sermon, mingled with Latin words, in which the verb "to give" comes in at every line: whatever you do, don't give to others, give to me; give to my convent, don't give to the convent next door:

A! yif that covent half a quarter otes! A! yif that covent four and twenty grotes! A! yif that frere a peny and let him go.... Thomas, of me thou shalt nat ben y-flatered; Thou woldest ban our labour al for noght.[537]

Pay then, give then, give me this, or only that; Thomas gives less still.

Familiar scenes, equally true but of a more pleasing kind, are found in other narratives, for instance in the story of Chauntecleer the cock, so well localised with a few words, in a green, secluded country nook:

A poure widwe, somdel stope in age Was whylom dwelling in a narwe cotage, Bisyde a grove, standing in a dale.

Her stable, her barn-yard are described; we hear the lowing of the cows and the crowing of the cock; the tone rises little by little, and we get to the mock-heroic style. Chauntecleer the cock,

In al the land of crowing nas his peer. His vois was merier than the mery orgon On messe-days that in the chirche gon; Wel sikerer was his crowing in his logge Than is a clokke, or an abbey orlogge.... His comb was redder than the fyn coral, And batailed, as it were a castel-wal!

He had a black beak, white "nayles," and azure legs; he reigned unrivalled over the hens in the barn-yard. One of the hens was his favourite, the others filled subalternate parts. One day--

This storie is al-so trewe, I undertake As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, That wommen holde in ful gret reverence,

--he was looking for "a boterflye," and what should he see but a fox! "Cok, cok!" he cries, with a jump, and means to flee.

"Gentil sire, allas! wher wol ye gon? Be ye affrayed of me that am your freend?"

says the good fox; I came only to hear you sing; you have the family talent:

My lord your fader (God his soule blesse!),

sang so well; but you sing better still. To sing better still, the cock shuts his eye, and the fox bears him off. Most painful adventure! It was a Friday: such things always befall on Fridays.

O Gaufred, dere mayster soverayn, That whan the worthy King Richard was slayn With shot, compleynedest his deth so sore, Why ne had I now thy sentence and thy lore, The Friday for to chide, as diden ye?[538]

Great commotion in the barn-yard; and here we find a picture charming for its liveliness: "Out! harrow! and weyl-away! Ha, ha, the fox!" every one shrieks, yells, runs; the dogs bark,

Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges;

the ducks scream,

The gees for fere flowen over the trees,

and the bees come out of their hives. The prisoner is set free; he will be more prudent another time; order reigns once more in the domains of Chauntecleer.

Side by side with such tales of animals, we have elegant stories of the Round Table, borrowed from the lays of "thise olde gentil Britons," and which carry us back to a time when,

In tholde dayes of the King Arthour Of which that Britons speken greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye; The elf-queen, with hir joly companye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;

oriental legends, which the young squire will relate, with enchantments, magic mirrors, a brass horse that transports its rider through the air, here or there according as one touches a peg in its ears, an ancestor doubtless of "Clavilegno," the steed of Don Quixote in the Duchesse's park; biographies of Appius and Virginia, of Caesar, of Nero, of Holophernes, of Hugolino in the tower of hunger, taken from Roman history, the Bible and Dante; adventures of chivalry, in which figures Theseus, duke of Athens, where blood flows profusely, with all the digressions and all the embellishments which still continued to please great men and great ladies, and that is why the story is told by the knight, and Chaucer retains purposely all the faults of that particular sort of story. In opposition to his usual custom, he contents himself here with lending a little life to illuminations of manuscripts.[539]

Grave personages relate grave stories, like canticles or sermons, coloured as with the light of stained glass, perfumed with incense, accompanied by organ music: story of the pious Constance, of St. Cecilia, of a child killed by the Jews; dissertations of dame Prudence (a tale of wondrous dulness,[540] which Chaucer modestly ascribes to himself); story of the patient Griselda; discourse of the poor parson. A while ago we were at the inn; now we are in church; in the Middle Ages striking colours and decided contrasts were best liked; the faded tints that have since been in fashion, mauve, cream, old-green, did not touch any one; and we know that Chaucer, when he was a page, had a superb costume, of which one leg was red and the other black. Laughter was inextinguishable; it rose and fell and rose again, rebounding indefinitely; despair was immeasurable; the sense of _measure_ was precisely what was wanting; its vulgarisation was one of the results of the Renaissance. Panegyrics and satires were readily carried to the extreme. The logical spirit, propagated among the learned by a scholastic education, was producing its effect: writers drew apart one single quality or characteristic and descanted upon it, neglecting all the rest. Thus it is that Griselda becomes Patience, and Janicola Poverty, and that by an easy and imperceptible transition the abstract personages of novels and the drama are created: Cowardice, Valiance, Vice. Those typical beings, whose names alone make us shudder, were considered perfectly natural; and, indeed, they bore a striking resemblance to Griselda, Janicola, and many other heroes of the most popular stories.

The success of Griselda is the proof of it. That poor girl, married to the marquis of Saluces, who repudiates her in order to try her patience, and then gives her back her position of wife, enjoyed an immense popularity. Boccaccio had related her misfortunes in the "Decameron"; Petrarch thought the story so beautiful that it appeared to him worthy of that supreme honour, a Latin translation: Chaucer translated it in his turn from Latin into English, and made of it his Clerk of Oxford's tale;[541] it was turned several times into French.[542] Pinturicchio represented the adventures of Griselda in a series of pictures, now preserved in the National Gallery; the story furnished the subject of plays in Italy, in France, and in England.[543] These exaggerated descriptions were just what went to the very heart; people wept over them in the fourteenth century as over Clarissa in the eighteenth. Petrarch, writing to Boccaccio about Griselda, uses almost the same terms as Lady Bradshaigh, writing to Richardson about Clarissa:

"Had you seen me, I surely should have moved your pity. When alone, in agonies would I lay down the book, take it up again, walk about the room, let fall a flood of tears, wipe my eyes, read again--perhaps not three lines--throw away the book, crying out: 'Excuse me, good Mr. Richardson, I cannot go on; it is your fault, you have done more than I can bear.'"[544]

I made "one of our mutual friends from Padua," writes Petrarch, "a man of elevated mind and vast learning, read this story. He had hardly got half through, when suddenly he stopped, choking with tears; a moment after, having composed himself, he took up the narrative once more to continue reading, and, behold, a second time sobs stopped his utterance. He declared it was impossible for him to continue, and he made a person of much instruction, who accompanied him, finish the reading." About that time, in all probability, Petrarch, who, as we see in the same letter, liked to renew the experience, gave the English poet and negotiator, who had come to visit him in his retreat, this tale to read, and Chaucer, for that very reason less free than with most of his other stories, scarcely altered anything in Petrarch's text. With him as with his model, Griselda is Patience, nothing more; everything is sacrificed to that virtue; Griselda is neither woman nor mother; she is only the patient spouse, Patience made wife. They take her daughter from her, to be killed, as they tell her, by order of the marquis. So be it, replies Griselda:

"Goth now," quod she, "and dooth my lordes heste; But o thing wil I preye yow of your grace. That, but my lord forbad yow, atte leste, Burieth this litel body in som place, That bestes ne no briddes it to-race." But he no word wol to that purpos seye, But took the child and wente upon his weye.[545]

Whereupon every one goes into ecstasies, and is greatly affected. The idea of entreating her husband, of throwing herself at his feet, of trying to move him, never enters her mind; she would no longer be playing her part, which is not to be a mother, but to be: Patience.

Chaucer left his collection of tales uncompleted; we have less than the half of it; but he wrote enough to show to the best his manifold qualities. There appear in perfect light his masterly gifts of observation, of comprehension, and of sympathy; we well see with what art he can make his characters stand forth, and how skilfully they are chosen to represent all contemporaneous England. The poet shows himself full of heart, and at the same time full of sense; he is not without suspicion that his pious stories, indispensable to render his picture complete, may offend by their monotony and exaggerated good sentiments. In giving them place in his collection, he belongs to his time and helps to make it known; but a few mocking notes, scattered here and there, show that he is superior to his epoch, and that, in spite of his long dissertations and his digressions, he has, what was rare at that period, a certain notion, at least theoretical, of the importance of proportion. He allows his heroes to speak, but he is not their dupe; in fact he is so little their dupe that sometimes he can stand their talk no longer, and interrupts them or laughs at them to their very face. He laughs in the face of the tiresome Constance, on the night of her wedding; he shows us his companions riding drowsily on their horses to the sound of the monk's solemn stories, and hardly preserved from actual slumber by the noise of the horse's bells. He allows the host abruptly to interrupt him when, to satirise the romances of chivalry, he relates, in "rym dogerel," the feats of arms and marvellous adventures of the matchless Sir Thopas.[546] Before we could even murmur the word "improbable," he warns us that the time of Griseldas has passed, and that there exist no more such women in our day. As the pilgrims draw near Canterbury, and it becomes seemly to finish on a graver note, he causes his poor parson to speak, and the priest announces beforehand that his discourse will be a sermon, a real sermon, with a text from Scripture: "Incipit sermo," says one of the manuscripts. He will speak in prose, as in church:

Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest, Whan I may sowen whete if that me lest?

All agree, and it is with the assent of his companions, who become more serious as they approach the holy city, that he commences, for the good of their souls, his ample "meditation." The coarse story told by the miller had been justified by excuses no less appropriate to the person and to the circumstances; the person was a clown, and chanced to be drunk; now the person is a saint, and, as it happens, they are just nearing the place of pilgrimage.

The good sense which caused the poet to write his "Canterbury Tales" according to a plan so conformable to reason and to nature, is one of the most eminent of Chaucer's qualities. It reveals itself in the details as in the whole scheme, and inspires him, in the midst of his most fanciful inventions, with reassuring remarks which show that earth and real life are not far away, and that we are not in danger of falling from the clouds. He reminds us at an opportune moment that there is a certain nobility, the highest of all, which cannot be bequeathed in a will; that the corrupt specimens of a social class should not cause the whole class to be condemned:

Of every ordre som shrewe is, parde;[547]

that, in the education of children, parents should be careful not to treat them too soon as men; if one takes them to merry-makings before time, they become "to sone rype and bold, ... which is ful perilous." He expresses himself very freely about great captains, each of whom would have been called "an outlawe or a theef" had they done less harm.[548] This last idea is put forth in a few lines of a humour so truly English that it is impossible not to think of Swift and Fielding; and, indeed, Fielding can the more appropriately be named here as he has devoted all his novel of "Jonathan Wild the Great" to the expounding of exactly the same thesis.

Finally, we owe to this same common sense of Chaucer's a thing more remarkable yet: namely, that with his knowledge of Latin and of French, and living in a circle where those two languages were in great favour, he wrote solely in English. His prose, like his verse, his "Treatise on the Astrolabe" like his tales, are in English. He belongs to the English nation, and that is why he writes in that language; a reason of that sort is sufficient for him: "Suffyse to thee thise trewe conclusiouns in English, as wel as suffyseth to thise noble clerkes Grekes thise same conclusiouns in Greek, and to Arabians in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to the Latin folk in Latin." Chaucer, then, will make use of plain English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national language, the king's English--"the king that is lord of this langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest possible relation:

The wordes mote be cosin to the dede.[550]

The same wisdom is again the cause why Chaucer does not spend himself in vain efforts to attempt impossible reforms, and to go against the current. It has been made a subject of reproach to him in our day; and some, from love of the Saxon past, have been indignant at the number of French words Chaucer uses; why did he not go back to the origins of the language? But Chaucer was not one of those who, as Milton says, think "to pound up the crows by shutting their park gates;" he employed the national tongue, as it existed in his day; the proportion of French words is not greater with him than with the mass of his contemporaries. The words he made use of were living and fruitful, since they are still alive, they and their families; the proportion of those that have disappeared is wonderfully small, seeing the time that has elapsed. As to the Anglo-Saxons, he retained, as did the nation, but without being aware of it, something of their grave and powerful genius; it is not his fault if he ignored these ancestors; every one in his day ignored them, even such thinkers as Langland, in whom lived again with most force the spirit of the ancient Germanic race. The tradition was broken; in the literary past one went back to the Conquest, and thence without transition to "thise olde gentil Britons." In his enumeration of celebrated bards, Chaucer gives a place to Orpheus, to Orion, and to the "Bret Glascurion"; but no author of any "Beowulf" is named by him. Shakespeare, in the same manner, will derive inspiration from the national past; he will go back to the time of the Roses, to the time of the Plantagenets, to the time of Magna Charta, and, passing over the Anglo-Saxon period, he will take from the Britons the stories of Lear and of Cymbeline.

The brilliancy with which Chaucer used this new tongue, the instant fame of his works, the clear proof afforded by his writings that English could fit the highest and the lowest themes, assured to that idiom its definitive place among the great literary languages. English still had, in Chaucer's day, a tendency to resolve itself into dialects; as, in the time of the Conquest, the kingdom had still a tendency to resolve itself into sub-kingdoms. Chaucer knew this, and was concerned about it; he was anxious about those differences of tongue, of orthography, and of vocabulary; he did all in his power to regularise these discordances; he had set ideas on the subject; and, what was rare in those days, the whims of copyists made him shudder. Nothing shows better the faith he had in the English tongue, as a literary language, than his reiterated injunctions to the readers and scribes who shall read his poems aloud or copy them. He experiences already, concerning his work, the anxieties of the poets of the Renaissance:

And for ther is so greet diversitee In English, and in writyng of our tonge, So preye I God, that noon miswryte thee, Ne thee mysmetre for defaute of tonge, And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe, That thou be understonde I God beseche![551]

Chaucer himself looked over the transcriptions done from his original manuscripts by his amanuensis Adam; he corrected with minute care every fault; he calls down all manner of woe upon the "scriveyn's" head, if, copying once more "Boece" or "Troilus," he leaves as many errors again.[552] We seem to hear Ronsard himself addressing his supplications to the reader: "I implore of you one thing only, reader, to pronounce well my verses and suit your voice to their passion ... and I implore you again, where you will see this sign: (!) to raise your voice a little, to give grace to what you read."[553]

Chaucer's efforts were not exercised in vain; they assisted the work of concentration. After him, the dialects lost their importance; the one he used, the East Midland dialect, has since become the language of the nation.

His verse, too, is the verse of the new literature, formed by a compromise between the old and the new prosody. Alliteration, which is not yet dead, and which is still used in his time, he does not like; its jingle seems to him ridiculous:

I can nat geste--run, ram, ruf--by lettre.[554]

Ridiculous, too, in his eyes is the "rym dogerel" of the popular romances of which "Sir Thopas" is the type. His verse is the rhymed verse, with a fixed number of accents or beats, and a variable number of syllables. Nearly all the "Tales" are written in heroic verse, rhyming two by two in couplets and containing five accentuated syllables.

The same cheerful, tranquil common sense which made him adopt the language of his country and the usual versification, which prevented him from reacting with excess against received ideas, also prevented his harbouring out of patriotism, piety, or pride, any illusions about his country, his religion, or his time. He belonged to them, however, as much as any one, and loved and honoured them more than anybody. Still the impartiality of judgment of this former prisoner of the French is wonderful, superior even to Froissart's, who, the native of a border-country, was by birth impartial, but who, as age crept on, showed in the revision of his "Chronicles" decided preferences. Towards the close of the century Froissart, like the Limousin and the Saintonge, ranked among the conquests recovered by France. Chaucer, from the beginning to the end of his career, continues the same, and the fact is all the more remarkable because his turn of mind, his inspiration and his literary ideal, become more and more English as he grows older. He remains impartial, or, rather, outside the great dispute, in which, however, he had actually taken part; his works do not contain a single line directed against France, nor even any praise of his country in which it is extolled as the successful rival of its neighbour.

For this cause Des Champs, a great enemy of the English, who had not only ravaged the kingdom in general but burnt down his own private country house, made an exception in his hatred, and did homage to the wisdom and genius of the "noble Geoffrey Chaucer," the ornament of the "kingdom of Eneas," England.