Grace E. Hadow

“ The contrast between her worldliness and that of the Monk is complete. He is gross, jovial, self-indulgent; she is delicate, mincing, conventional. Like Cressida she would always follow the line of least resistance, though it would cause her genuine—if but momentary—distress to give pain to anyone. She is too well-bred ever to think for herself, and too innocent and simple-minded not to accept life as it is offered her. She tells her story with real tenderness and feeling, and it is evident that the atmosphere of the cloister in no wise irks her. ”

“ Humour.—If it is difficult to draw a hard-and-fast line round other elements of comedy, and detach wit from satire, or satire from farce, it is still harder to attempt to isolate humour and discuss it as a separate and distinct property. Humour is the sympathetic appreciation of the comic, the faculty which enables us to love while we laugh, and to love the better for our laughter. ”

“ Shrewd, worldly, and unimaginative, we should imagine that the coarser tales best please his taste, but it is his business to cater for people of all kinds, and he well understands how to ensure sufficient variety to suit all listeners. His rough good-humoured air of authority is sufficient to keep the Friar and the Somnour within bounds. He prevents the drunken Cook from becoming an intolerable nuisance to the company. He keeps an eye on every individual pilgrim, and sees that no one is overlooked. ”

“ Constance is no tragedy-queen, but a true-hearted, simple woman; and the fact that she lives in a world of miracles never obtrudes itself. We accept her adventures without a qualm since our interest lies in her personality, and the odd thing is that her personality, attractive as it is, strikes one as so little out of the common. Writers of the day, as a rule, desired either to point a moral or to thrill their readers by sheer force of adventure. Chaucer took the accepted conventions of his day, and pierced through them to the human nature underneath. ”

“ The interest was concentrated in the hero and heroine, and though some faithful servant or lady-in-waiting might assist their lovers, it would have been regarded as undignified in the extreme to give prominence to such a character. Chaucer flings dignity to the winds. What he cares for is truth to life, and already he has made the great discovery that certain persons are not told off by nature to be unhappy and certain others to be amusing, but that a perfectly common-place and ordinary individual may play a part in tragedy without even realising what tragedy is. ”

“ If Shakespeare shows us the sleepy porter unbarring the gate of Macbeth’s castle, or the grave-diggers of Elsinore singing at their work, it is not because he wants our thoughts to dwell on either the one or the other. They have their place as part of the tragedy, and it is the sense of tragedy, not the triviality of the incident which is uppermost in our mind. But the comic poet saunters gaily through life pausing to notice every trifle as he passes. He views the world as the unaccustomed traveller views a foreign country ”

“ The heroines of the less savoury tales are coarser in fibre and for the most part lower in the social scale than Calkas’ daughter, and their stories are of mere sensuous self-indulgence with none of the charm and poetry which marks the tale of Troilus and Cressida. One character alone recalls Chaucer’s earlier heroine. The Prioress is very much what a fourteenth-century Cressida would have been if her friends had placed her in a convent instead of finding her a husband. She has the same daintiness and trimness, the same superficial tender-heartedness. ”

“ There is no sting in such laughter, no conscious superiority; on the contrary, it contains an element of tenderness. Obviously humour is distinct from satire, but it can be distinguished from farce and wit only by insisting on the externals when speaking of them. Humour is indeed the soul of all comedy. Satire, being [Pg 168] destructive, not constructive, is in a class apart, but even satire—as we have seen in Chaucer’s picture of a crowd—may become so softened by humour that it loses the element of caricature and serves only to give a keener edge to wit. ”

“ Cressida is incapable of being swept away by a great passion. She has a cat-like softness and daintiness and charm, a cat’s readiness to attach herself to the person she is with at the moment, and a cat’s adaptability to circumstances. She is genuinely distressed at being parted from Troilus, she cries till her eyes have dark rings round them, and even Pandarus is moved at the sight, but she is incapable of exposing herself to any danger or inconvenience for her lover’s sake. ”

“ Emily is drawn with comparatively few strokes, but she gives us very much the same impression as Blanche. There is the same sense of the open air, the same simplicity and directness. Nothing better brings out the peculiar quality of Chaucer’s heroine than a comparison between the Emily of the Knightes Tale and the Emily of Two Noble Kinsmen. The one walks alone in the garden, gathering flowers, and singing to herself for sheer lightness of heart. ”

“ Indeed the whole of the Phisiciens Tale seems curiously cold and lifeless. There is a touch of nature at the end where the child, forgetting her piety, flings her arms round her father’s neck, and asks if there is no remedy, and again where she begs him to smite softly, but these are not enough to atone for the perfunctoriness of the rest. The story is too essentially tragic for the barest narration of it not to make some appeal to us, but it is impossible not to feel that Chaucer was either hurried or working against the grain when he wrote his version. ”

“ And Chaucer’s lines to his empty purse show that he had no wish to share the pleasant security of those who are able, as Florent’s wife says, to sing and play in the presence of thieves.
In yet a third respect, Chaucer shows [Pg 220] himself able to discriminate between the use and abuse of a thing. He can expose and denounce hypocrisy without losing his reverence for true religion; he can point out evils in social life, without siding wholly with nobles or people; he can laugh at the folly which allows itself to be deluded by charlatanism, without losing his respect for science. ”

“ The thrill of the Renaissance has not yet swept across Europe. The gods still sleep, before awakening to their strange sweet Indian summer of life. Classical mythology serves Chaucer as an additional storehouse of story and illustration, but it no more intoxicates him with rapture than does the Gesta Romanorum. ”

“ Something has already been said of the softening influence of comedy. It is humour which enables us to see the other person’s point of view, to distinguish between crimes and misdemeanours, so that we no more wish to convert Sir Toby from the error of his ways than to reduce the fat boy’s appetite. Above all, it is humour which points out those endearing peculiarities, those little foibles and harmless weaknesses which give Parson Adams and the Vicar of Wakefield so warm a place in our affections. ”

“ True humour, however, contains far more than this. If comedy plays on the surface of life, its greatest exponents bring home to us the fact that that surface covers a depth. It is no accident that causes Shakespeare’s comedies to deepen in tone until they become well-nigh indistinguishable from tragedies, or that leads [Pg 147] Chaucer to introduce a Pandarus into the tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde. Comedy has a double value. It is amusing, and it is also a bond which connects us with everyday life. ”

“ Husband-hunting is a sport which has roused the laughter of men from time immemorial; Chaucer is one of the few who has ever portrayed that fierce shrinking from the thought of matrimony which is no less common among women. Emily longing to be free to roam in the forest and “noght to been a wyf,” and Constance trembling at the thought of the strange man into whose hands she is being committed, are as true to life as the Wife of Bath with her husbands five at the Church door. ”

“ The Squieres Tale forms, as it were, a half-way house between the serious treatment of romance in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knightes Tale, and the pure parody of Chaucer’s own “tale of mirthe.”
Sir Thopas parodies not only the matter but the manner of the romance writers. It out-Herods Herod in the intolerable jingle of its verse and the absurdity of its extra syllables, while the adventures of Sir Thopas and the fairy queen prove too much even for the pilgrims, ready as they are to be interested in a story of any kind. ”

“ Both give one a sense of sturdy honesty and kindliness, and know how to combine tenderness with strength. Both, with all their tolerance, have a keen eye for hypocrisy or affectation and a sharp tongue wherewith to chastise and expose it. Chaucer hates no one, not even the Pardoner, as whole-heartedly as Fielding hates Master Blifil, but the Pardoners Tale affords the best instance of the satiric bent of the poet’s humour when he is brought face to face with a scheming rogue. ”

“ He can depict innocent suffering, he can arouse our sympathy and stir our pity, but he never strikes the note of real tragedy. It is not only that no one of his many heroes and heroines experiences any tragic conflict of soul, but in the simple presentation of suffering Chaucer shows little of that power of grim suggestion, of appeal to the imagination, which are among the most essential characteristics of the tragic poet. Cressida’s hesitation has nothing grand or tragic about it. She is simply uncertain which course will bring her most happiness. ”

“ We hear the nightingale singing her to sleep, or watch her colour come and go as Troilus draws near, and our mind is so filled with an image of youth and beauty that we never stop to think if she is fair or dark. ”

“ They are real enough, but they have no very marked individuality. The Squire is by far the best of them. In him we see the charm and freshness of youth, and it would be ungracious to ask more of so fair a promise. But Troilus, with his tearfulness and emotionalism, his readiness to procrastinate and to look to others to help him out of his difficulties, with something of Bassanio’s gallantry and attractiveness, has also Bassanio’s pliability. His is too slight a nature to form the centre of a tragedy. Palamon and Arcite are as indistinguishable as Demetrius and Lysander. ”

“ Chaucer possesses this faculty of amused observation in a pre-eminent degree. Again and again he contrives to invest some perfectly trifling and commonplace incident with an air of whimsicality, and by so doing to make it at once realistic and remote. We are never wholly absorbed by what amuses us, in the sense that we are absorbed by what appeals to our tragic emotions. Laughter implies a certain detachment, whereas in tragedy we feel with those concerned with an intensity which often causes us to lose all consciousness of our own individuality. ”

“ Through the whole picture there breathes a [Pg 132] spirit of vigour and freshness and gaiety. Once again Chaucer seems to foreshadow Shakespeare: Blanche might well take her place beside Rosalind and Portia and Beatrice, as a type of simple unspoiled girlhood. Her frank enjoyment of life, her keen wit, which knows no touch of malice, her combination of tender-heartedness and strength remind us more than once of Shakespeare’s heroines, and like them she is no colourless model of propriety, but has all a true woman’s charm and unexpectedness. ”

“ If Chaucer’s reputation rested upon the Book of the Duchesse, the Parlement of Foules, the Hous of Fame, and the Legend of Good Women, a few scholars would know and appreciate his work, and anthologies would probably make the majority of readers acquainted with a few carefully-chosen extracts, but he would have done little or nothing to break down the literary conventions of his day. It would need a keen eye to discern in these the dawn of a new era, without the light thrown upon them by Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. ”