Chaytor

“ Thus, then, Chaucer had passed away;—whether in good or in evil odour with the powerful interest with which John of Gaunt's son had entered into his unwritten concordate, after all matters but little now. He is no dim shadow to us, even in his outward presence; for we possess sufficient materials from which to picture to ourselves with good assurance what manner of man he was. ”

“ But it is not only in a love of birds, which, after all, is common to most poets, that Chaucer shows this side of his nature. Reference has already been made to the whelp and the squirrels which he introduces into the Book of the Duchesse. The little coneys who hasten to their play in the garden of the Parlement of Foules are due in the first place to Boccaccio, but the Italian merely tells us that they “go hither and thither.” His picture is dainty and pretty, but it lacks the half-amused tenderness of Chaucer’s. ”

“ That's much more fun to talk about than Chaucer. I'm glad I didn't live in his day. Imagine being praised for not putting your fingers in the gravy and spotting up your shirt front! I wager that old Prioress was a stick. I shouldn't want her on our basket ball team. There isn't a sensible woman in the whole of Chaucer so far as I can see. (the curtain at the front of the bookcase begins to shake slightly, becoming more violent as the Junior continues) The Wife of Bath was a regular Mormon, five husbands, that's what she had, and she wore red stockings. ”

“ But if Chaucer is ill at ease within four walls, and takes but scant pleasure in looking at tapestries and pictures, the moment he slips out of doors he becomes a different being. He is no Wordsworth noting each twig and leaf, or watching with mystic gaze the shadows fall on the silent hills. ”

“ Perched on Nature's hand was a beautiful female eagle, by whom the poet is supposed to have signified the Lady Blanche of Lancaster. Three eagles dispute vehemently as to which of them shall be her mate, and Nature refers the question to the assembly of birds. Each kind of bird chooses a representative to speak for them, and in the speeches of the different birds there is ample scope for Chaucer's playful humour and irony. Characteristic of the spirit of chivalry is the great deference paid by the suitors to the lady herself. ”

“ Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more delightful than the Black Knight's description of his lost lady as she was at the time when he wooed and almost despaired of winning her. Many of the touches in this description—and among them some of the very happiest—are, it is true, borrowed from the courtly Machault; but nowhere has Chaucer been happier, both in his appropriations and in the way in which he has really converted them into beauties of his own, than in this, perhaps the most lifelike picture of maidenhood in the whole range of our literature. ”

“ That the same man should enjoy the coarse humour of the Friar and the Reve, and yet treat womanhood and childhood with such tender reverence, is one of the mysteries of human nature. Prof. Ten Brink, as has been said, believes that Chaucer passed through a phase of intense religious feeling. “A worldling has to reproach himself with all sorts of things,” he writes, “especially when he lives at a court like that of Edward III and is intimate with a John of Gaunt. Chaucer ... naturally seeks in religion the power for self-conquest and improvement. ”

“ Here is what he says of Chaucer in his preface to The Fables:—
"He [Chaucer] must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation, in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies persons. ”

“ But, besides, Chaucer was a poet of the highest genius, and the beauties of his verse are marvellous considering the rough and troubled times in which he wrote. Most of the earlier writers had been clerics, and none approached the grace of Chaucer, a layman. But, what is perhaps more wonderful still, he had no followers, certainly none for more than a century after his death, who came near him in beauty of language or of thought. ”

“ The Scottish Chaucerians are of far more intrinsic importance. The love-allegory of the Kingis Quair shows the influence of [Pg 237] Chaucer not only in its use of the Chaucerian stanza—henceforth to be known as the rhyme royal—but in the evidence it affords of its author’s acquaintance with the English version of the Romance of the Rose. Moreover, in it may be noticed that sympathy with the freshness and joy of nature which forms so strong a bond between Chaucer and his Scottish disciples, and is so conspicuous by its absence in the work of the English Chaucerians. ”

“ Chaucer's characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one or other of these characters; nor can a child be born who is not one of these characters of Chaucer. The Doctor of Physic is described as the first of his profession: perfect, learned, completely Master and Doctor in his art. Thus the reader will observe that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind; every one is an Antique Statue, the image of a class, and not of an imperfect individual. ”

“ I am glad to perceive that some of the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" are turning their attention to the elucidation of Chaucer. The text of our father-poet, having remained as it were in fallow since the time of Tyrwhitt, now presents a rich field for industry; and, in offering free port and entry to all comments and suggestions, to be there sifted and garnered up, the pages of "Notes and Queries" may soon become a depository from which ample materials may be obtained for a new edition of Chaucer, now become an acknowledged desideratum. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Briefly, it is a very poor piece; and my chief object in reprinting it is to shew how unworthy it is of Clanvowe, not to mention Chaucer. We have no right even to assign it to Lydgate. And its date may be later than 1450.
§ 55. XX. The Flower and the Leaf.
This piece many 'critics' would assign to Chaucer, merely because they like it. This may be sentiment, but it is not criticism; and, after all, a desire to arrive at the truth should be of more weight with us than indulgence in ignorant credulity. ”

“ And having made their acquaintance, Chaucer begins to describe them all so that we may know them too. He describes them so well that he makes them all living to us. Some we grow to love; some we smile upon and have a kindly feeling for, for although they are not fine folk, they are so very human we cannot help but like them; and some we do not like at all, for they are rude and rough, as the poet meant them to be.
Chapter XXIV CHAUCER—AT THE TABARD INN CHAUCER begins his description of the people who were gathered at the Tabard Inn with the knight, who was the highest in rank among them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ George, the king made him a grant of a pitcher of wine daily, to be received in the port of London from the king's butler [70] . This was, doubtless, found to be rather a troublesome gift; accordingly, it was commuted, in 1378 (April 18) , for the annual sum of 20 marks (13l. 6s. 8d.) [71] . The original grant was made 'dilecto Armigero nostro, Galfrido Chaucer.'
On May 10, in the same year, the corporation of London granted Chaucer a lease for his life of the dwelling-house situate above the city-gate of Aldgate, on condition that he kept the same in good repair ”

“ The lad then told the old man that his wife would bear him many more children, and that never again would he need to use his knife. Leaving the old man and his wife rejoicing, the lads went on their way, and after travelling a long way came at length to a house where lived a man called Cayote, [8] who said he was a great medicine-man and could do great things. "What can you do?" said the youngest lad, who knew him to be an idle boaster. "Oh, I am a very great man," said Cayote; "and I eat nothing but the bodies of men. I have just finished eating a man." ”

“ Doubtless Chaucer was a man of practical good sense, desirous of suitable employment and of a sufficient income; nor can we suppose him to have been one of those who look upon social life and its enjoyments with a jaundiced eye, or who, absorbed in things which are not of this world, avert their gaze from it altogether. ”

“ John of Gaunt was born in 1340, and was, therefore, probably of much the same age as Chaucer, and like him now in the prime of life. Nothing could accordingly be more natural than that a more or less intimate relation should have formed itself between them. ”

“ Chaucer was smoking outside my pet hut talking to a couple of his subalterns, and a string of men was lined up beside the field kitchen for tea. Close by, the batman, recovered from his illness, was putting a fishing-rod together, and one of the subalterns blew his nose on a gaudy handkerchief which I recognised at once.
I went straight back and told the Town Major of Ripilly that one of the new divisional huts was being occupied by the Sappers. It wasn't cricket, but it was all I could do.
"That's all right," he said. "Chaucer's acting as divisional R.E. He's entitled to one hut. ”

“ The middle class, in short, was learning to hold up its head, collectively and individually. The historical original of Chaucer's "Host"—the actual Master Harry Bailly, vintner and landlord of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, was likewise a member of Parliament, and very probably felt as sure of himself in real life as the mimic personage bearing his name does in its fictitious reproduction. ”

“ The well-meaning busybodies who come to comfort Criseyde are as helplessly incompetent as “the goos, the cokkow, and the doke,” but though fussy and self-centred, they have too much real kindliness for it to be possible not to feel a certain affection for them. Perhaps the best of all Chaucer’s crowds is that in the Squieres Tale which gathers to look at the horse of brass, and the other magic gifts:—
[Pg 166] Diverse folk diversely they demed ”

“ Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry, he is our 'well of English undefiled,' because by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid diction, the fluid movement, of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid diction of which in these poets we feel the virtue, and at another it is his fluid movement. ”

“ Another—it is Chaucer's successor Lydgate—introduces Priam's sons exercising their bodies in tournaments and their minds in the glorious play of chess, and causes the memory of Hector to be consecrated by the foundation of a chantry of priests who are to pray for the repose of his soul. A third finally condemns the erring Cressid to be stricken with leprosy, and to wander about with cup and clapper, like the unhappy lepers in the great cities of the Middle Ages. Everything, in short, is transfused by the spirit of the adapters' own times ”

“ Physically, as has been seen, he represents himself as prone to the habit of casting his eyes on the ground; and we may feel tolerably sure that to this external manner corresponded a quiet, observant disposition, such as that which may be held to have distinguished the greatest of Chaucer's successors among English poets. To us, of course, this quality of modesty in Chaucer makes itself principally manifest in the opinion which he incidentally shows himself to entertain concerning his own rank and claims as an author. ”

“ To give a man 'a glazen hood' meant, in Old English, to mock, delude, cajole. It appears in Piers the Plowman, B. xx. 171, where a story is told of a man who, fearing to die, consulted the physicians, and gave them large sums of money, for which they gave him in return 'a glasen houve,' i. e. a hood of glass, a thing that was no defence at all. Still clearer is the allusion to the same proverb in Chaucer himself, in a passage explained by no previous editor, in Troil. and Cres. v. 469, where Fortune is said to have an intention of deluding Troilus ”

“ We may have to look up a word here and there in the glossary, or find ourselves puzzled by some astronomical or chemical terms, but these are merely by the way, and Chaucer fairly lays claim to the title of Father, not only of English poetry, but of modern English.
In metre his work is no less remarkable. Professor Skeat, in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Chaucer’s works, gives a list [Pg 39] of no less than thirteen metres which he introduced into English poetry, consisting for the most part of modifications and alterations of French and Italian models. ”