G. G. Coulton

“ The constitution of the city was frankly oligarchical, yet the mere fact that the citizens should have a constitution of their own, which they often had to defend against encroachments by brotherly co-operation, by heavy sacrifices of money, or even at the risk of bloodshed—this in itself was the thin end of the democratic wedge in national politics. Rich merchants might, indeed, domineer over their fellow-citizens by naked tyranny and sheer weight of money, which (as 14th-century writers assert in even less qualified terms than those of our own day) controls all things under the sun. ”

“ The truth is that the feudal system was already slowly but surely breaking down in England: our lower classes, with recognized constitutional rights on the one hand, and on the other hand a rough military organization and discipline of their own, were, in many ways, far more free in 1389 than the French peasants of 1789. Chaucer and Froissart always felt at the bottom of their hearts this coming of the People; it lends a breadth to their thoughts and colour to their brush even when they paint the gorgeous pageantry of overripe feudalism ”

“ Chaucer’s triumph of artistic simplicity is the Nun’s Priest’s tale. The old woman, her daughter, their smoky cottage and tiny garden; the hens bathing in the dust while their lord and master preens himself in the sun; the commotion when the fox runs away with Chanticleer—all these things are described in truly Virgilian sympathy with modest country life. What poet before him has made us feel how glorious a part of God’s creation is even a barn-door cock? ”

“ For Goethe, the soul of Italy was in its pagan antiquity; but Chaucer found there a living art and living literature, the noblest in the then world. The great semicircle of houses standing upon projecting arches round the harbour of Genoa, which survived to be drawn by Ruskin in their decay, would at once strike a noble note of contrast to the familiar wooden dwellings built over Thames shingle at home; everywhere he would find greater buildings and brighter colours than in our northern air. ”

“ Like many others in the Middle Ages, he seems convinced of the peculiar instability of the English character. He knew that he was living—as all generations are more or less conscious of living—in an uncomfortable borderland between that which once was, but can be no longer, and that which shall be, but cannot yet come to pass; yet all these changes supplied the artist with that variety of colour and form which he needed; and the man seems to have gone through life in the tranquil conviction that this was a pleasant world, and his own land a particularly privileged spot. ”

“ Those who were separated by only a few generations from the Middle Ages could seldom judge them with sufficient sympathy. Even two hundred years ago, most Englishmen thought of that time as a great forest from which we had not long emerged; they looked back and saw it in imagination as Dante saw the dark wood of his own wanderings—bitter as death, cruel as the perilous sea from which a spent swimmer has just struggled out upon the shore. ”

“ It is just because we should never dream of choosing France or Germany for our home that we love them so much for our holidays; it is just because we are so deeply rooted in our own age that we find so much pleasure and profit in the past, where we may build for ourselves a new heaven and a new earth out of the wreck of a vanished world. ”

“ Indeed, if our poet had not been keenly sensible of the beauty of holiness, then the less Chaucer he! As it is, he stands the most Shakespearian figure in English literature, after Shakespeare himself. Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety. We venerate him for his years, and he daily startles us with the eternal freshness of his youth. ”

“ Yet all through this critical discussion he kept silence, “lest men should his affection espy!” The separation, he knows, will kill him; but among all the measures he debates with Criseyde or Pandarus—even among the desperate acts which he threatens to commit—nothing so desperate as plain marriage seems to occur to any of the three. The first thought of Troilus is “how to save her honour,” but only in the technical sense of medieval chivalry, by feigning indifference to her. He sheds floods of tears; he tells Fortune that if only he may keep his lady, he is reckless of all else in the world ”

“ When the great fen, or moor, which watereth the walls of the city on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice; some, striding as wide as they may, do slide swiftly; others make themselves seats of ice, as great as millstones; one sits down, many hand in hand to draw him, and one slipping on a sudden, all fall together; some tie bones to their feet and under their heels; and shoving themselves by a little piked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air, or an arrow out of a cross-bow. ”

“ All the oppressions that were then done under the sun, and the tears of such as were oppressed, show very small in the sum-total of things; the ancient tale of wrong has little meaning to us who repose so far above it all; the real landmarks are the great men who for a moment moulded the world to their own will, or those still greater who kept themselves altogether unspotted from it. Human nature gives the lie direct to Mark Antony’s bitter rhetoric: it is rather the good that lives after a man, and the evil that is oft interred with his bones. ”

“ Father Hubert is one of those jovial sinners for whom old Adam has always a lurking sympathy even when the new Adam feels most bound to condemn them. Essentially irreligious even in his most effective religious discourse; greedy, unabashed, as ubiquitous and intrusive as a bluebottle fly, he is yet always supple and ingratiating; a favourite boon-companion of the country squires, but still more popular with many women; equally free and easy with barmaids at a tavern or with wife and daughter in a citizen’s hall. ”

“ No one poet represents that love so fully as Chaucer, in both its aspects. I say in both, and not in all, for such love as lent itself to picturesque treatment had then practically only two aspects, the most ideal and the most material. The maiden whose purity of heart and freedom of manners are equally natural was not only non-existent at that stage of society, but inconceivable. Emelye is, within her limits, as beautiful and touching a figure as any in poetry ”

“ Her dignified reserve, her natural anxiety to set off a fine person with more elaboration of costume than the strict Rule permitted, her French of Stratford attë Bowe, her tenderness to lapdogs and even to marauding mice, her faultless refinement of behaviour under the ticklish conditions of a 14th-century dinner-table—all these pardonable luxuries of a fastidious nature are described with Chaucer’s most delicate irony, and stand in artistic contrast to the grosser indiscipline of the Monk. ”

“ Wherever he went, the cities were already building, or had newly built, the finest of the Gothic structures which adorn them still; and Chaucer must have passed through Pisa and Florence like a new Æneas among the rising glories of Carthage. A whole population of great artists vied with each other in every department of human skill—
Giotto and Andrea Pisano were not long dead; their pupils were carrying on the great traditions; and splendid schools of sculpture and painting flourished, especially in those districts through which our poet’s business led him. ”

“ But when exhausted France could no longer yield more than a mere livelihood to the armies which overran her, then at last things found their proper level, and the nation wearied of bloodshed. “Universal conscription proved then as now the great inculcator of peace. To the burgher called from the loom and the dyeing pit and the market stall to take down his bow or dagger, war was a hard and ungrateful service, where reward and plunder were dealt out with a niggardly hand; and men conceived a deep hatred of strife and disorder of which they had measured all the misery.” ”

“ When we count up the forces that produced Wycliffism—the notorious corruption of the papal court, its unpopular French leanings, the vast sums drawn from England by foreign ecclesiastics, the unpopularity of the clergy at home, the growth of the English language and national spirit—among all these causes we must not forget to note that Wycliffe and his contemporaries, in their early manhood, had struggled through a year of horrors almost beyond modern conception. ”

“ Any great change from the ordinary routine marks a bright spot in most men’s minds, even in these days of many amusements and much locomotion; so that, in proportion as the King’s peace grew more effectual in England, and places of pilgrimage multiplied, and the middle classes could better afford the expense of time or money, it became as natural to many people to go to Walsingham or Canterbury for the sake of the pleasant society as it was to choose a church for the sake of gossip or flirtation. ”

“ Johnson’s friend, “I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” It is difficult, however, not to surmise a great deal of more or less unwilling philosophy beneath Chaucer’s delightful flow of good-humour. His subtle ironies may tell as plain a tale as other men’s open complaints; and sometimes he hastens to laugh where we might suspect a rising lump in his throat. ”

“ Few men, however, could afford even these rudiments of privacy; people like Chaucer, of fair income and good social position, still found in their homes many of the discomforts of shipboard; and their daily intercourse with their fellow-men bred the same blunt familiarity, even beneath the most ceremonious outward fashions. It was not only starveling dependents like Lippo Lippi, whose daily life compelled them to study night and day the faces and outward ways of their fellow-men. ”

“ There is no such story as this in all medieval literature; no such wonderful gallery of finished portraits, nor any drama so true both to common life and to perfect art. The dramatis personæ of the “Decameron” are mere puppets in comparison; their occasional talk seems to us insipid to the last degree of old-world fashion; Boccaccio’s preface and interludes are as much less dramatic than Chaucer’s as their natural background is more picturesque, with its Great Plague in Florence and its glimpses of the Val d’Arno from that sweet hill-garden of cypress and stone-pine and olive. ”

“ No artist of the Middle Ages—or, indeed, of any but quite recent times—could have earned by his genius a passport into society for wife and family as well as himself; nor could anything but a miracle have unbarred for Chaucer that paradise of splendid work, pure domestic felicity, and social success which attracts us so much in the life of Burne-Jones. ”

“ These, then, were the men before whose face Gower describes his fellow-landlords as lurking like wild beasts in the woods, feeding on grass and acorns, and wishing that they could shrink within the very rind of the trees; the men who a day or two later surged like a sea round Chaucer’s tower of Aldgate, until some accomplice unbarred the gate. ”

“ But here, in the Middle Ages, it is fifty to one that the fortunes of the pair are not exactly suitable; or he, or she, or both may be married already. Then comes the final clause: Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Seldom indeed could the course of true love run smooth in an age of business-marriages; and the poet found his grandest material in the wreckage of tender passions and high hopes upon that iron-bound shore. ”

“ CHAPTER I ENGLAND IN EMBRYO
Few men could lay better claim than Chaucer to this happy accident of birth with which Matthew Arnold endows his Scholar Gipsy, if we refrain from pressing too literally the poet’s fancy of a Golden Age. Chaucer’s times seemed sordid enough to many good and great men who lived in them; but few ages of the world have been better suited to nourish such a genius, or can afford a more delightful travelling-ground for us of the 20th century. ”

“ In Chaucer’s life, as in the “Seven Ages of Man,” the soldier follows hard upon the lover; he is scarcely out of his ’teens before we find him riding to the Great War, “in hope to stonden in his lady grace.” He fought in that strange campaign of 1359-60, which began with such magnificent preparations, but ended so ineffectually. Edward marched across France from Calais to Reims with a splendid army and an unheard-of baggage train; but the towns closed their gates, the French armies hovered out of his reach, and the weather was such that horses and men died like flies. ”

“ They were constantly in each other’s sight, yet could never by any possibility exchange a couple of confidential sentences except by a secret and dangerous rendezvous in some private room, or by such stray chances as some meeting on the stairs, some accident which dispersed the hunting-party and left them alone in the forest, or similar incidents consecrated to romance. The three great excitements of man’s life—war, physical exercise, and carousing—touched the ladies far less nearly, and left them ordinarily to a life which their modern sisters would condemn as hopelessly dull. ”

“ The most learned of modern apologists for the Middle Ages, Léon Gautier, is driven to put back the Golden Age one century further, thus implying that Francis and Dominic, Aquinas and Dante, the glories of Westminster and Amiens, the saintly King who dealt justice under the oak of Vincennes, and twice led his armies oversea against the heathen, all belonged to an age of decadence in chivalry. Yet, even at this sacrifice, the Golden Age escapes us. ”

“ In “Troilus and Cressida” we have real men and women under all the classical machinery: they think and act as men thought and acted in Chaucer’s time; and Pandarus especially is so lifelike and individual that Shakespeare will transfer him almost bodily to his own canvas. In the “House of Fame” and the “Legend of Good Women” the form indeed is again allegorical, but the poet’s individuality breaks through this narrow mask; his self-revelations are franker and more direct than at any previous time; and in each case he wearied of the poem and broke off long before the end. ”