Chapter II: Chaucer (1)

The new nation had its poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. By his origin, his education, his tastes, his manner of life, as well as by his writings, Chaucer represents the new age; he paints it from nature, and is a part of it. His biography is scarcely less characteristic than his works, for he describes nothing through hearsay or imagination. He is himself an actor in the scenes he depicts; he does not dream, he sees them.

His history is a sort of reduction of that of the English people at that day. They are enriched by trade, and Chaucer, the son of merchants, grows up among them. The English people no longer repair to Paris in order to study, and Chaucer does not go either; their king wages war in France, and Chaucer follows Edward along the military roads of that country; they put more and more trust in Parliament, and Chaucer sits in Parliament as member for Kent. They take an interest in things of beauty, they are fond of the arts, and want them to be all aglow with ornamentation and bright with smiles; Chaucer is clerk of the king's works, and superintends the repairs and embellishments of the royal palaces. Saxon monotony, the sadness that followed after Hastings, are forgotten past memory; this new England knows how to laugh and also how to smile; she is a merry England, with bursts of joy, and also an England of legends, of sweet songs, and of merciful Madonnas. The England of laughter and the England of smiles are both in Chaucer's works.

I.

Chaucer's life exactly fills the period we have now come to, during which the English people acquired their definitive characteristics: he was born under Edward III. and he died shortly after the accession of Henry of Lancaster. At that time Petrarch and Boccaccio were long since dead, France had no poet of renown, and Chaucer was without comparison the greatest poet of Europe.

His family belonged to the merchant class of the City. His father, John Chaucer, his uncle, Thomas Heyroun, and other relations besides, were members of the Corporation of Wine Merchants, or Vintners. John Chaucer was purveyor to the Court, and he accompanied Edward III. on his first expedition to the Continent: hence a connection with the royal family, by which the future poet was to profit. The Chaucers' establishment was situated in that Thames Street which still exists, but now counts only modern houses; Geoffrey was probably born there in 1340, or a little earlier.[448]

Chaucer spent the years of his childhood and youth in London: a London which the great fire of 1666 almost totally destroyed, that old London, then quite young, of which illuminated manuscripts have preserved to us the picturesque aspect. The paternal house was near the river, and by the side of the streamlet called Walbrook, since covered over, but which then flowed in the open air. On the noble river, the waters of which were perhaps not as blue as illuminators painted them, but which were not yet the liquid mud we all know, ships from the Mediterranean and the Baltic glided slowly, borne by the tide. Houses with several stories and pointed roofs lined the water, and formed, on the ground floor, colonnades that served for warehouses, and under which merchandise was landed.[449] The famous London Bridge, built under King John, almost new still, for it was only entering upon its second century and was to live six hundred years, with its many piers, its sharp buttresses, the houses it bore, its chapel of St. Thomas, stood against the line of the horizon, and connected the City with the suburb of Southwark. On that side were more houses, a fine Gothic church, which still exists, hostelries in abundance, for it was the place of arrival for those coming by land; and with the hostelries, places of amusement of every kind, a tradition so well established that most of the theatres in the time of Elizabeth were built there, and notably the celebrated Globe, where Shakespeare's plays were performed. Save for this suburb, the right shore of the Thames, instead of the warehouses of to-day, offered to view the open country, trees, and green meadows. Some way down, on the left side, rose the walls of the Tower; and further up, towards the interior of the City, the massive pile of St. Paul's stood out above the houses. It was then a Gothic cathedral; Wren, after the great fire, replaced it by the Renaissance edifice we see to-day. The town was surrounded by walls, portions of which still remain, with Roman foundations in some places.[450] At intervals gates opened on the country, defended by bastions, their memory being preserved at this day by names of streets: Aldgate, Bishopsgate, &c.

The town itself was populous and busy. The streets, in which Chaucer's childhood was spent, were narrow, bordered by houses with projecting stories, with signs overhanging the way, with "pentys" barring the footpath, and all sorts of obstructions, against which innumerable municipal ordinances protested in vain. Riders' heads caught in the signs, and it was enjoined to make the poles shorter; manners being violent, the wearing of arms was prohibited, but honest folk alone conformed to the law, thus facilitating matters for the others; cleanliness was but indifferent; pigs ran hither and thither. A decree of the time of Edward I. had vainly prescribed that they should all be killed, except those of St. Anthony's Hospital, which would be recognised by the bell hanging at their neck: "And whoso will keep a pig, let him keep it in his own house." Even this privilege was withdrawn a little later, so elegant were manners becoming.[451]

In this laborious city, among sailors and merchants, acquiring a taste for adventure and for tales of distant lands, hearing his father describe the beautiful things to be seen at Court, Geoffrey grew up, from a child became a youth, and, thanks to his family's acquaintances, was appointed, at seventeen, page to Elizabeth, wife of Lionel, son of Edward III.[452] In his turn, and not as a merchant, he had access to the Court and belonged to it. He dressed in the fashion, and spent seven shillings for a short cloak or paltock, shoes, and a pair of red and black breeches.

In 1359 he took part in the expedition to France, led by the king. It seemed as if it must be a death-blow to the French: the disaster of Poictiers was not yet repaired; the Jacquerie had just taken place, as well as the Parisian riots and the betrayal and death of Marcel; the king of France was a prisoner in London, and the kingdom had for its leader a youth of twenty-two, frail, learned, pious, unskilled in war. It looked as though one had but to take; but once more the saying of Froissart was verified; in the fragile breast of the dauphin beat the heart of a great citizen, and the event proved that the kingdom was not "so discomfited but that one always found therein some one against whom to fight." The campaign was a happy one neither for Edward nor for Chaucer. The king of England met with nothing but failures: he failed before Reims, failed before Paris, and was only too pleased to sign the treaty of Bretigny. Chaucer was taken by the French,[453] and his fate would not have been an enviable one if the king had not paid his ransom. Edward gave sixteen pounds to recover his daughter-in-law's page. Everything has its value: the same Edward had spent fifty pounds over a horse called Bayard, and seventy for another called Labryt, which was dapple-grey.

After his return Chaucer was attached to the person of Edward in the capacity of valet of the chamber, "valettus camerae regis"; this is exactly the title that Moliere was later to honour in his turn. His functions consisted in making the royal bed, holding torches, and carrying messages. A little later he was squire, _armiger_, _scutifer_, and as such served the prince at table, and rode after him in his journeys.[454] His duties do not seem to have absorbed all his thoughts, for he found time to read many books, to write many poems, to be madly enamoured of a lovely unknown person who did not respond to his passion,[455] to marry "Domicella" or "Damoiselle" Philippa, attached to the service of the queen, then to the service of Constance, second wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster--without ceasing however, because he could not, as he assures us, do otherwise, still to love his unknown beauty.[456]

He reads, he loves, he writes, he is a poet. We do not know whom he loved, but we know what he read and what he wrote at that time. He read the works which were in fashion in the elegant society he lived among: romances of chivalry, love-songs, allegorical poems, from "Roland" and "Tristan" to the "Roman de la Rose." Poets, even the greatest, rarely show their originality at twenty, and Chaucer was no exception to the rule; he imitated the writings best liked by those around him, which, at the Court of the king, were mostly French books. However it might be with the nation, the princes had remained French; the French language was their native tongue; the beautiful books, richly illustrated, that they kept to divert themselves with on dull days, in their "withdrawing-room," or "chambre de retrait," were French books, of which the subject for the most part was love. In this respect there was, even at that time, no difference between the north and the south. Froissart stays at Orthez, in 1388, with Monseigneur Gaston Phebus de Foix; and at Eltham, at the Court of Richard II. in 1394. In each case he uses exactly the same endeavours to please: both personages are men of the same kind, having the same ideal in life, imbued with the same notions, and representing the same civilisation. He finds them both speaking French very well; Gaston "talked to me, not in his own Gascon, but in fair and good French"; Richard, too, "full well spoke and read French." The historian was duly recommended to each of them, but he relied especially, to make himself welcome, on a present he had brought, the same in both cases, a French manuscript containing amorous poems, which manuscript "the Comte de Foix saw full willingly; and every night, after his supper, I read to him from it. But in reading none durst speak nor say a word; for he wanted me to be well heard."

He takes the same precautions when he goes to England, where he had not been seen for a quarter of a century, and where he scarcely knew any one now: "And I had beforehand caused to be written, engrossed and illuminated and collected, all the amorous and moral treatises that, in the lapse of thirty-four years, I had, by the grace of God and of Love, made and compiled." He waits a favourable opportunity, and one day when the councils on the affairs of State are ended, "desired the king to see the book that I had brought him. Then he saw it in his chamber, for all prepared I had it; I put it for him upon his bed. He opened it and looked inside, and it pleased him greatly: and please him well it might, for it was illuminated, written and ornamented and covered in scarlet velvet, with ten silver nails gilded with gold, and golden roses in the middle, and with two great clasps gilded and richly worked in the middle with golden roses.

"Then the king asked me of what it treated, and I told him: of Love.

"With this answer he was much rejoiced, and looked inside in several places, and read therein, for he spoke and read French full well; and then had it taken by one of his knights, whom he called Sir Richard Credon, and carried into his withdrawing-room, and treated me better and better."[457]

Long before this last journey of the illustrious chronicler, Chaucer was familiar with his poems, and he was acquainted, as most men around him were, with those of his French contemporaries: Deguileville, Machault, Des Champs, and later Granson.[458] He sings like them of love, of spring, of the field-daisy[459]; he had read with passionate admiration the poem, composed in the preceding century, which was most liked of all the literature of the time, the "Roman de la Rose."

This famous poem was then at the height of a reputation which was to last until after the Renaissance. The faults which deter us from it contributed to its popularity as much as did its merits; digressions, disquisitions, and sermons did not inspire the terror they do now; twenty-three thousand lines of moralisation, psychological analysis, abstract dissertations, delivered by personified abstractions, did not weary the young imagination of the ancestors. The form is allegorical: the rose is the maiden whom the lover desires to conquer: this form, which fell later into disfavour, delighted the readers of the fourteenth century for whom it was an additional pleasure to unriddle these easy enigmas.

The Church had helped to bring allegories into vogue; commentators had early explained the New Testament by the Old, one being an allegory of the other: the adventure of Jonah and the whale was an allegory of the resurrection; the Bestiaries were series of allegories; the litanies of the Virgin lists of symbols. The methods of pious authors were adopted by worldly ones; Love had his religion, his allegories, his litanies, not to speak of his paradise, his hell, and his ten commandments. He had a whole celestial court of personified abstractions, composed of those tenuous and transparent beings who welcome or repel the lover in the garden of the Rose. It was a new religion, this worship of woman, unknown to the ancients; Ovid no longer sufficed, imitators could not help altering his aim and ideal; the new cult required a gospel; that gospel was the "Roman de la Rose."[460]

The discrepancies in the book did not shock the generality of readers; art at that time was full of contrasts, and life of contradictions, and the thing was so usual that it went unnoticed. Saints prayed on the threshold of churches, and gargoyles laughed at the saints. Guillaume de Lorris built the porch of his cathedral of Love, and placed in the niches tall, long figures of pure and noble mien. Jean de Meun, forty years later, continued the edifice, and was not sparing of gargoyles, mocking, grotesque, and indecent. Thence followed interminable discussions, some holding for Guillaume, others for Jean, some rejecting the whole romance, others, the most numerous, accepting it all. These dissensions added still more to the fame of the work, and it was so popular that there exist more than two hundred manuscripts of it.[461] The wise biographer of the wise king Charles V., Christina of Pisan, protested in the name of insulted women: "To you who have beautiful daughters, and desire well to introduce them to honest life, give to them, give the Romaunt of the Rose, to learn how to discern good from evil; what do I say, but evil from good! And of what utility, nor what does it profit listeners to hear such horrible things?" The author "never had acquaintance nor association with an honourable or virtuous woman"; he has known none save those of "dissolute and evil life," and has taken all the others to be according to that pattern.[462] The illustrious Gerson, in the fifteenth century, did the romance the honour of refuting it by a treatise according to rule; but the poem was none the less translated into Latin, Flemish, and English, printed a number of times at the Renaissance and rejuvenated and edited by Marot.

There were several English translations, and one of them was the work of our young "Valettus camerae regis." This translation by Chaucer is lost,[463] but we are aware not only that it existed, but even that it was celebrated; its merit was known in France, and Des Champs, in sending his works to Chaucer,[464] congratulates him, above all things, on having "planted the rose-tree" in "the isle of giants," the "angelic land," "Angleterre," and on being there the god of worldly loves:

Tu es d'amours mondains dieux on Albie
Et de la Rose en la terre Angelique ...
En bon angles le livre translatas.

This authority in matters of love which Des Champs ascribes to his English brother-author, is real. Chaucer composed then a quantity of amorous poems, in the French style, for himself, for others, to while away the time, to allay his sorrows. Of them said Gower:

The lande fulfylled is over all.

Most of them are lost; but we know, from contemporaneous allusions, that they swarmed, and from himself that he wrote "many an ympne" to the God of love, "balades, roundels, virelayes,"

bokes, songes, dytees,
In ryme, or elles in cadence,

each and all "in reverence of Love."[465] A few poems, however, of that early period, have reached us. They are, amongst others, his "Compleynte unto Pite"--

Pite, that I have sought so yore ago
With herte sore, and ful of besy peyne ...

--a rough sketch of a subject that Sidney was to take up later and bring to perfection, and his "Book of the Duchesse," composed on the occasion of the death of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt.

The occasion is sad, but the setting is exquisite, for Chaucer wishes to raise to the Duchess who has disappeared a lasting monument, that shall prolong her memory, an elegant one, graceful as herself, where her portrait, traced by a friendly hand, shall recall the charms of a beauty that each morning renewed. So lovable was she, and so full of accomplishment,

That she was lyk to torche bright,
That every man may take of light
Ynogh, and hit hath never the lesse.[466]

Already the descriptions have a freshness that no contemporaries equal, and show a care for truth and a gift of observation not often found in the innumerable poems in dream-form left to us by the writers of the fourteenth century.

Tormented by his thoughts and deprived of sleep, the poet has a book brought to him to while away the hours of night, one of those books that he loved all his life, where "clerkes hadde in olde tyme" rhymed stories of long ago. The tale, "a wonder thing" though it was, puts him to sleep, and it seems to him that it is morning. The sun rises in a pure sky; the birds sing on the tiled roof, the light floods the room, which is all painted according to the taste of the Plantagenets. On the walls is represented "al the Romaunce of the Rose"; the window-glass offers to view the history of Troy; coloured rays fall on the bed; outside,

the welken was so fair,
Blew, bright, clere was the air ...
Ne in al the welken was a cloude.

A hunt goes by, 'tis the hunt of the Emperor Octavian; the young man mounts and rides after it under those great trees, "so huge of strengthe, so ful of leves," beloved of the English, amid meadows thick studded with flowers,

As thogh the erthe envye wolde
To be gayer than the heven.

A little dog draws near; his movements are observed and noted with an accuracy that the Landseers of to-day could scarcely excel. The dog would like to be well received, and afraid of being beaten, he creeps up and darts suddenly away:

Hit com and creep to me as lowe,
Right as hit hadde me y-knowe,
Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres,
And leyde al smothe down his heres.
I wolde han caught hit, and anoon
Hit fledde and was fro me goon.

In a glade apart was a knight clothed in black, John of Lancaster. Chaucer does not endeavour to console him; he knows the only assuagement for such sorrows, and leads him on to speak of the dead. John recalls her grace and gentleness, and praises qualities which carry us back to a time very far from our own. She was not one of those women who, to try their lovers, send them to Wallachia, Prussia, Tartary, Egypt, or Turkey:

She ne used no suche knakkes smale.[467]

From these "knakkes smale" we may judge what the others must have been. They discourse thus a long while; the clock strikes noon, and the poet awakes, his head on the book which had put him to sleep.

II.

In the summer of 1370 Chaucer left London and repaired to the Continent for the service of the king; this was the first of his diplomatic missions, which succeeded each other rapidly during the ensuing ten years. The period of the Middle Ages was not a period of _nuances_; that _nuance_ which distinguishes an ambassador from a messenger was held as insignificant, and escaped observation; the two functions formed but one. "You," said Eustache Des Champs, "you, ambassador and messenger, who go about the world to do your duty at the Courts of great princes, your journeys are not short ones!... Don't be in such a hurry; your plea must be submitted to council before an answer can be returned: just wait a little more, my good friend; ... we must talk of the matter with the chancellor and some others.... Time passes and all turns out wrong."[468] Precedents are a great thing in diplomacy; here we find a time-honoured one.

Recourse was often had to men of letters, for these mixed functions, and they were filled by the most illustrious writers of the century, Boccaccio in Italy, Chaucer in England, Des Champs in France. The latter, whose career much resembles Chaucer's, has traced the most lamentable pictures of the life led by an "ambassador and messenger" on the highways of Europe: Bohemia, Poland, Hungary; in these regions the king's service caused him to journey. His horse is half dead, and "sits on his knees"[469]; the inhabitants have the incivility to speak only their own language, so that one cannot even order one's dinner; you must needs take what is served: "'Tis ill eating to another's appetite."[470]

The lodging is worse: "No one may lie by himself, but two by two in a dark room, or oftener three by three, in one bed, haphazard." One may well regret sweet France, "where each one has for his money what he chooses to ask for, and at reasonable price: room to himself, fire, sleep, repose, bed, white pillow, and scented sheets."[471]

Happily for Chaucer, it was in Flanders, France, and Italy that he negotiated for Edward and Richard. In December, 1372, he traverses all France, and goes to Genoa to treat with the doge of commercial matters; then he repairs to Florence, and having thus passed a whole winter far from the London fogs (which already existed in the Middle Ages), he returns to England in the summer of 1373. In 1376 a new mission is entrusted to him, this time a secret one, the secret has been well kept to this day; more missions in 1377 and 1378. "On Trinity Sunday," 1376, says Froissart, "passed away from this world the flower of England's chivalry, my lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, in the palace of Westminster by London, and was embalmed and put into a leaden chest." After the obsequies, "the king of England made his children recognise ... the young _damoisel_ Richard to be king after his death." He sends delegates to Bruges to treat of the marriage of his heir, aged ten, with "Madame Marie, daughter of the king of France"; in February other ambassadors are appointed on both sides: "Towards Lent, a secret treaty was made between the two kings for their party to be at Montreuil-on-sea. Thus were sent to Calais, by the English, Messire Guichard d'Angle, Richard Stury, and Geoffrey Chaucer."[472] The negotiation failed, but the poet's services seem nevertheless to have been appreciated, for in the following year he is again on the highways. He negotiates in France, in company with the same Sir Guichard, now become earl of Huntingdon; and again in Italy, where he has to treat with his compatriot Hawkwood,[473] who led, in the most agreeable manner possible, the life of a condottiere for the benefit of the Pope, and of any republic that paid him well.

These journeys to Italy had a considerable influence on Chaucer's mind. Already in that privileged land the Renaissance was beginning. Italy had, in that century, three of her greatest poets: the one whom Virgil had conducted to the abode of "the doomed race" was dead; but the other two, Petrarch and Boccaccio, still lived, secluded, in the abode which was to be their last on earth, one at Arqua, near Padua, the other in the little fortified village of Certaldo, near Florence.

In art, it is the century of Giotto, Orcagna, and Andrew of Pisa. Chaucer saw, all fresh still in their glowing colours, frescoes that time has long faded. Those old things were then young, and what seems to us the first steps of an art, uncertain yet in its tread, seemed to contemporaries the supreme effort of the audacious, who represented the new times.

Chaucer's own testimony is proof to us that he saw, heard, and learnt as much as possible; that he went as far as he could, letting himself be guided by "adventure, that is the moder of tydinges." He arrived without any preconceived ideas, curious to know what occupied men's minds, as attentive as on the threshold of his "Hous of Fame":

For certeynly, he that me made
To comen hider, seyde me,
I shulde bothe here et see,
In this place wonder thinges ...
For yit peraventure, I may lere
Some good ther-on, or sumwhat here,
That leef me were, or that I wente.[474]

He was thus able to see with his own eyes the admirable activity, owing to which rose throughout Italy monuments wherein all kinds of contradictory aspirations mingled, and which are nevertheless so harmonious in their _ensemble_, monuments of which Giotto's campanile is the type, wherein we still recognise the Middle Ages, even while we foresee the Renaissance--with Gothic windows and a general aspect which is classic, where the sentiment of realism and everyday life is combined with veneration for antique art, where Apelles is represented painting a triptych of Gothic shape. Pisa had already, at that day, its leaning tower, its cathedral, its baptistery, the exterior ornamentation of which had just been changed, its Campo Santo, the paintings of which were not finished, and were not yet attributed to Orcagna. Along the walls of the cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques which inspired the Tuscan artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. At Florence the Palazzo Vecchio, which was not yet called thus, was finished; so were the Bargello, Santa-Croce, Santa-Maria-Novella. Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the Lansquenets was scarcely begun; the baptistery had as yet only one of its famous doors of bronze; the cathedral disappeared under scaffoldings; the workmen were busy with the nave and the apse. Giotto's campanile had been finished by his pupil Gaddi, the Ponte Vecchio, which did not deserve that name any better than the palace, had been rebuilt by the same Gaddi, and along the causeway which continued it, through clusters of cypress and olive trees, the road led up to San Miniato, all resplendent with its marbles, its mosaics, and its paintings. On other ranges of hills, amid more cypress and more olive trees, by the side of Roman ruins, arose the church of Fiesole, and half-way to Florence waved in the sunlight the thick foliage overshadowing the villa which, during the great plague had sheltered the young men and the ladies of the "Decameron."

The movement was a general one. Each town strove to emulate its neighbour, not only on the battlefields, which were a very frequent trysting-place, but in artistic progress; paintings, mosaics, carvings, shone in all the palaces and churches of every city; the activity was extreme. Giotto, who had his studio, his "botega," in Florence, worked also at Assisi, Rome, and Padua. Sienna was covering the walls of her public palace with frescoes, some figures of which resemble the paintings at Pompeii.[475] An antique statue found within her territory was provoking universal admiration, and was erected on the Gaia fountain by the municipality; but the Middle Ages did not lose their rights, and, the republic having suffered reverses, the statue fell into disgrace. The god became nothing more than an idol; the marble was shattered and carried off, to be treacherously interred in the territory of Florence.[476]

The taste for collections was spreading; the commerce of antiquities flourished in Northern Italy. Petrarch bought medals, and numbered among his artistic treasures a Madonna of Giotto, "whose beauty," he says in his will, "escaped the ignorant and enraptured the masters of the art."[477] This brightening of the land was the result of concurring wills, nor did it pass unobserved even then; towns enjoyed their masterpieces, and, like young women, "se miraient en leur beaute." Contemporaries did not leave to posterity the care of crowning the great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the honour was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the "Divine Comedy" were instituted in Florence, and the lecturer was Boccaccio.[479]

It was impossible that a mind, from infancy friendly to art and books, should not be struck by this general expansion; the charm of this literary springtime was too penetrating for Chaucer not to feel it; he followed a movement so conformable to his tastes, and we have a proof of it. Before his journeys he was ignorant of Italian literature; now he knows Italian, and has read the great classic authors of the Tuscan land: Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante. The remembrance of their works haunts him; the "Roman de la Rose" ceases to be his main literary ideal. He was acquainted with the old classics before his missions; but the tone in which he speaks of them now has changed; to-day it is a tone of veneration; one should kiss their "steppes." He expresses himself about them as Petrarch did; it seems, so great is the resemblance, as if we found in his verses an echo of the conversations they very likely had together by Padua in 1373.[480]

In the intervals between his missions Chaucer would return to London, where administrative functions had been entrusted to him. For twelve years, dating from 1374, he was comptroller of the customs, and during the ten first years he was obliged, according to his oath, to write the accounts and to draw up the rolls of the receipts with his own hand: "Ye shall swere that ... ye shall write the rolles by your owne hande demesned."[481] To have an idea of the work this implies, one should see, at the Record Office, the immense sheets of parchment fastened together, one after the other, which constitute these rolls.[482] After having himself been present at the weighing and verifying of the merchandise, Chaucer entered the name of the owner, the quality and quantity of the produce taxed, and the amount to be collected: endless "rekeninges!" Defrauders were fined; one, John Kent, of London, having tried to smuggle some wools to Dordrecht, the poet, poet though he was, discovered the offence; the wools were confiscated and sold, and Chaucer received seventy-one pounds four shillings and sixpence on the amount of the fine John Kent had to pay.

Chaucer lived now in one of the towers under which opened the gates of London. The municipality had granted him lodgings in the Aldgate tower[483]; his friend the philosopher and logician, Ralph Strode, lived in the same way in rooms above "Aldrichgate"[484]; both were to quit the place at any moment if the defence of the town rendered it necessary. Chaucer lived there twelve years, from 1374 to 1386. There, his labour ended, he would come home and begin his _other life_, his poet's life, reading, thinking, remembering. Then all he had known in Italy would return to his memory, campaniles, azure frescoes, olive groves, sonnets of Petrarch, poems of Dante, tales of Boccaccio; he had brought back wherewithal to move and to enliven "merry England" herself. Once more in his tower, whither he returned without speaking to any one, "domb," he says, "as any stoon," the everyday world was done with; his neighbours were to him as though they had lived at the ends of earth[485]; his real neighbours were Dante and Virgil.

He wrote during this period, and chiefly in his tower of Aldgate, the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile," 1373; the "Compleynt of Mars," 1380; a translation of Boethius in prose; the "Parlement of Foules;" "Troilus and Criseyde," 1382; the "Hous of Fame," 1383-4; the "Legend of Good Women," 1385.[486] In all these works the ideal is principally an Italian and Latin one; but, at the same time, we see some beginning of the Chaucer of the last period, who, having moved round the world of letters, will cease to look abroad, and, after the manner of his own nation, dropping in a large measure foreign elements, will show himself above all and mainly an Englishman.

At this time, however, he is as yet under the charm of Southern art and of ancient models; he does not weary of invoking and depicting the gods of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted as a chastisement on the damned, scandalises him no more than it did the painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," reclining on her couch, "a bed of golde," clothed in transparent draperies,

Right with a subtil kerchef of Valence,
Ther was no thikker cloth of no defence;

or with less draperies still:

I saw Beautee withouten any atyr[487];

or again:

Naked fleting in a see;

her brows circled with a "rose-garlond white and reed."[488] He calls her to his aid:

Now faire blisful, O Cipris,
So be my favour at this tyme!
And ye, me to endyte and ryme
Helpeth, that on Parnaso dwelle
By Elicon the clere welle.[489]

His "Compleynt of Anelida" is dedicated to

Thou ferse god of armes, Mars the rede,

and to Polymnia:

Be favourable eek, thou Polymnia,
On Parnaso that, with thy sustres glade,
By Elicon, not fer from Cirrea,
Singest with vois memorial in the shade,
Under the laurer which that may not fade.[490]

Old books of antiquity possess for him, as they did for the learned men of the Renaissance, or for Petrarch, who cherished a manuscript of Homer without being able to decipher it, a character almost divine:

For out of olde feldes, as men seith,
Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;
And out of olde bokes, in good feith,
Cometh al this newe science that men lere.[491]

Poggio or Poliziano could not have spoken in more feeling words.

Glory and honour, Virgil Mantuan,
Be to thy name![492]

exclaims he elsewhere. "Go, my book," he says to his "Troilus and Criseyde,"

And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, Stace.[493]

Withal strange discrepancies occur: none can escape entirely the influence of his own time. With Chaucer the goddess of love is also a saint, "Seint Venus"; her temple is likewise a church: "This noble temple ... this chirche." Before penetrating into its precincts, the poet appeals to Christ:

"O Crist," thought I, "that art in blisse,
Fro fantom and illusioun
Me save!" and with devocioun
Myn yen to the heven I caste.[494]

This medley was inevitable; to do better would have been to excel the Italians, and Dante himself, who places the Erinnyes within the circles of his Christian hell, or Giotto, who made Apelles paint a triptych.

As for the Italians, Chaucer borrows from them, sometimes a line, an idea, a comparison, sometimes long passages very closely translated, or again the plot or the general inspiration of his tales. In the "Lyf of Seinte Cecile" a passage (lines 36-51) is borrowed from Dante's "Paradiso." The same poet is quoted in the "Parlement of Foules," where we find a paraphrase of the famous "Per me si va"[495]; another passage is imitated from the "Teseide" of Boccaccio; "Anelida and Arcite" contains several stanzas taken from the same original; "Troilus and Criseyde" is an adaptation of Boccaccio's "Filostrato"; Chaucer introduces into it a sonnet of Petrarch[496]; the idea of the "Legend of Good Women" is borrowed from the "De claris Mulieribus" of Boccaccio. Dante's journeys to the spirit-world served as models for the "Hous of Fame," where the English poet is borne off by an eagle of golden hue. In it Dante is mentioned together with the classic authors of antiquity. Read:

On Virgil, or on Claudian,
Or Daunte.[497]

The eagle is not an invention of Chaucer's; it had already appeared in the "Purgatorio."[498]

Notwithstanding the quantity of reminiscences of ancient or Italian authors that recur at every page; notwithstanding the story of AEneas related wholly from Virgil, the first lines being translated word for word[499]; notwithstanding incessant allusions and quotations, the "Hous of Fame"[500] is one of the first poems in which Chaucer shows forth clearly his own personality. Already we see manifested that gift for familiar dialogue which is carried so far in "Troilus and Criseyde," and already appears that sound and kindly judgment with which the poet will view the things of life in his "Canterbury Tales." Evil does not prevent his seeing good; the sadness he has known does not make him rebel against fate; he has suffered and forgiven; joys dwell in his memory rather than sorrows; despite his moments of melancholy, his turn of mind makes him an optimist at heart, an optimist like La Fontaine and Addison, whose names often recur to the memory in reading Chaucer. His philosophy resembles the "bon-homme" La Fontaine's; and several passages in the "Hous of Fame" are like some of Addison's essays.[501]

He is modern, too, in the part he allots to his own self, a self which, far from being odious ("le moi est haissable," Pascal said), is, on the contrary, charming; he relates the long vigils in his tower, where he spends his nights in writing, or at other times seated before a book, which he reads until his eyes are dim in his "hermyte's" solitude.

The eagle, come from heaven to be his guide, bears him off where his fancy had already flown, above the clouds, beyond the spheres, to the temple of Fame, built upon an ice mountain. Illustrious names graven in the sparkling rock melt in the sun, and are already almost illegible. The temple itself is built in the Gothic style of the period, all bristling with "niches, pinnacles, and statues," and

... ful eek of windowes
As flakes falle in grete snowes.[502]

There are those rustling crowds in which Chaucer loved to mix at times, whose murmurs soothed his thoughts, musicians, harpists, jugglers, minstrels, tellers of tales full "of weping and of game," magicians, sorcerers and prophets, curious specimens of humanity. Within the temple, the statues of his literary gods, who sang of the Trojan war: Homer, Dares, and also the Englishman Geoffrey of Monmouth, "English Gaufride," and with them, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian, and Statius. At the command of Fame, the names of the heroes are borne by the wind to the four corners of the world; a burst of music celebrates the deeds of the warriors:

For in fight and blood-shedinge
Is used gladly clarioninge.[503]

Various companies flock to obtain glory; the poet does not forget the group, already formed in his day, of the braggarts who boast of their vices:

We ben shrewes, every wight,
And han delyt in wikkednes,
As gode folk han in goodnes;
And joye to be knowen shrewes ...
Wherfor we preyen yow, a-rowe,
That our fame swich be-knowe
In alle thing right as it is.[504]

As pressing as any, they urgently claim a bad reputation, a favour which the goddess graciously grants them.

Elsewhere we are transported into the house of news, noisy and surging as the public square of an Italian city on a day when "something" has happened. People throng, and crush, and trample each other to see, although there is nothing to see: Chaucer describes from nature. There are assembled numbers of messengers, travellers, pilgrims, sailors, each bearing his bag, full of news, full of lies:

"Nost not thou
That is betid, lo, late or now?"
--"No," quod the other, "tel me what."
And than he tolde him this and that,
And swoor ther-to that hit was sooth--
"Thus hath he seyd"--and "thus he dooth"--
"Thus shal hit be"--"Thus herde I seye"--
"That shal be found"--"That dar I leye."[505]

Truth and falsehood, closely united, form an inseparable body, and fly away together. The least little nothing, whispered in secret in a friend's ear, grows and grows, as in La Fontaine's fable:

As fyr is wont to quikke and go,
From a sparke spronge amis,
Til al a citee brent up is.[506]

III.

Heretofore Chaucer has composed poems of brightest hue, chiefly devoted to love, "balades, roundels, virelayes," imitations of the "Roman de la Rose," poems inspired by antiquity, as it appeared through the prism of the Middle Ages. His writings are superior to those of his English or French contemporaries, but they are of like kind; he has fine passages, charming ideas, but no well-ordered work; his colours are fresh but crude, like the colours of illuminations, blazons, or oriflammes; his nights are of sable, and his meadows seem of sinople, his flowers are "whyte, blewe, yelowe, and rede."[507] In "Troilus and Criseyde" we find another Chaucer, far more complete and powerful; he surpasses now even the Italians whom he had taken for his models, and writes the first great poem of renewed English literature.

The fortunes of Troilus had grown little by little in the course of centuries. Homer merely mentions his name; Virgil devotes three lines to him; Dares, who has seen everything, draws his portrait; Benoit de Sainte-More is the earliest to ascribe to him a love first happy, then tragic; Gui de Colonna intermingles sententious remarks with the narrative; Boccaccio develops the story, adds characters, and makes of it a romance, an elegant tale in which young Italian noblemen, equally handsome, youthful, amorous, and unscrupulous, win ladies' hearts, lose them, and discourse subtly about their desires and their mishaps.[508]

Chaucer appropriates the plot,[509] transforms the personages, alters the tone of the narrative, breaks the monotony of it, introduces differences of age and disposition, and moulds in his own way the material that he borrows, like a man now sure of himself, who dares to judge and to criticise; who thinks it possible to improve upon a romance even of Boccaccio's. The literary progress marked by this work is astonishing, not more so, however, than the progress accomplished in the same time by the nation. With the Parliament of Westminster as with Chaucer's poetry, the real definitive England is beginning.

In Chaucer, indeed, as in the new race, the mingling of the origins has become intimate and indissoluble. In "Troilus and Criseyde" the Celt's ready wit, gift of repartee, and sense of the dramatic; the care for the form and ordering of a narrative, dear to the Latin races; the Norman's faculty of observation, are allied to the emotion and tenderness of the Saxon. This fusion had been brought about slowly, when however the time came, its realisation was complete all at once, almost sudden. Yesterday authors of English tongue could only lisp; to-day, no longer content to talk, they sing.

In its semi-epic form, the poem of "Troilus and Criseyde" is connected with the art of the novel and the art of the drama, to the development of which England was to contribute so highly. It is already the English novel and drama where the tragic and the comic are blended; where the heroic and the trivial go side by side, as in real life; where Juliet's nurse interrupts the lovers leaning over the balcony of the Capulets, where princesses have no confidants, diminished reproductions of their own selves, invented to give them their cue; where sentiments are examined closely, with an attentive mind, friendly to experimental psychology; and where, nevertheless, far from holding always to subtile dissertations, all that is material fact is clearly exposed to view, in a good light, and not merely talked about. The vital parts of the drama are all exhibited before our eyes and not concealed behind the scenes; heroes are not all spirit, neither are they mere images; we are as far from the crude illuminations of degenerate minstrels as from La Calprenede's heroic romances; the characters have muscles, bones and sinews, and at the same time, hearts and souls; they are real men. The date of "Troilus and Criseyde" is a great date in English literature.

The book, like Froissart's collection of poems, treats "of love." It relates how Criseyde, or Cressida, the daughter of Calchas, left in Troy while her father returned to the Greek camp, loves the handsome knight Troilus, son of Priam. Given back to the Greeks, she forgets Troilus, who is slain.

How came this young woman, as virtuous as she was beautiful, to love this youth, whom at the opening of the story she did not even know? What external circumstances brought them together, and what workings of the heart made them pass from indifference to doubts and anxieties, and then to love? These two orders of thought are untwined simultaneously, on parallel lines by Chaucer, that dreamer who had lived so much in real life, that man of action who had dreamed so many dreams.

Troilus despised love, and mocked at lovers:

If knight or squyer of his companye
Gan for to syke, or lete his eyen bayten
On any woman that he coude aspye;
He wolde smyle, and holden it folye,
And seye him thus, "God wot she slepeth softe
For love of thee, whan thou tornest ful ofte."[510]

One day, in the temple, he sees Cressida, and his fate is sealed; he cannot remove his gaze from her; the wind of love has swept by; all his strength has vanished; his pride has fallen as the petals fall from a rose; he drinks deep draughts of an invincible poison. Far from her, his imagination completes what reality had begun: seated on the foot of his bed, absorbed in thought, he once more sees Cressida, and sees her so beautiful, depicted in outlines so vivid, and colours so glowing, that this divine image fashioned in his own brain is henceforth the only one he will behold; forever will he have before his eyes that celestial form of superhuman beauty, never more the real earthly Cressida, the frail daughter of Calchas. Troilus is ill for life of the love illness.

He has a friend, older than himself, sceptical, trivial, experienced, "that called was Pandare," Cressida's uncle. He confides to him his woes, and asks for help. Pandarus, in Boccaccio, is a young nobleman, sceptical too, but frivolous, disdainful, elegant, like a personage of Musset. Chaucer transforms the whole drama and makes room for the grosser realities of life, by altering the character of Pandarus. He makes of him a man of mature years devoid of scruples, talkative, shameless, wily, whose wisdom consists in proverbs chosen among the easiest to follow, much more closely connected with Moliere's or Shakespeare's comic heroes than with Musset's lovers. Pandarus is as fond of comparisons as Gros-Rene, as fond of old saws as Polonius; he is coarse and indecent, unintentionally and by nature, like Juliet's nurse.[511] He is totally unconscious, and thinks himself the best friend in the world, and the most reserved; he concludes interminable speeches by:

I jape nought, as ever have I joye.

Every one of his thoughts, of his words, of his attitudes is the very opposite of Cressida's and her lover's, and makes them stand out in relief by a contrast of shade. He is all for tangible and present realities, and does not believe in ever foregoing an immediate and certain pleasure in consideration of merely possible consequences.

With this disposition, and in this frame of mind, he approaches his niece to speak to her of love. The scene, which is entirely of Chaucer's invention, is a true comedy scene; the gestures and attitudes are minutely noted. Cressida looks down; Pandarus coughs. The dialogue is so rapid and sharp that one might think this part written for a play, not for a tale in verse. The uncle arrives; the niece, seated with a book on her knees, was reading a romance.

Ah! you were reading! What book was it? "What seith it? Tel it us. Is it of Love?" It was of Thebes; "this romaunce is of Thebes;" she had secured as it seems a very early copy. She excuses herself for indulging in so frivolous a pastime; she would perhaps do better to read "on holy seyntes lyves." Chaucer, mindful above all of the analysis of passions, does not trouble himself about anachronisms; he cares nothing to know if the besieged Trojans could really have drawn examples of virtue from the Lives of the Saints; history matters little to him: let those who take an interest in it look "in Omer or in Dares."[512] The motions of the human heart, that is his real subject, not the march of armies; from the moment of its birth, the English novel is psychological.

With a thousand precautions, and although still keeping to the vulgarity of his role, Pandarus manages so as to bring to a sufficiently serious mood the laughter-loving Cressida; he contrives that she shall praise Troilus herself, incidentally, before he has even named him. With his frivolities he mingles serious things, wise and practical advice like a good uncle, the better to inspire confidence; then he rises to depart without having yet said what brought him. Cressida's interest is excited at once, the more so that reticence is not habitual to Pandarus; her curiosity, irritated from line to line, becomes anxiety, almost anguish, for though Cressida be of the fourteenth century, and the first of a long line of heroines of romance, with her appears already the nervous woman. She starts at the least thing, she is the most impressionable of beings, "the ferfullest wight that might be"; even the state of the atmosphere affects her. What is then the matter? Oh! only this:

... the kinges dere sone,
The goode, wyse, worthy, fresshe, and free,
Which alwey for to do wel is his wone,
The noble Troilus, so loveth thee,
That, bot ye helpe, it wol his bane be.
Lo, here is al, what sholde I more seye?
Do what yow list.[513]

The conversation continues, more and more crafty on the part of Pandarus; his friend asks for so little: look less unkindly upon him, and it will be enough.

But here appears Chaucer's art in all its subtilty. The wiles of Pandarus, carried as far as his character will allow, might have sufficed to make a Cressida of romance yield; but it would have been too easy play for the master already sure of his powers. He makes Pandarus say a word too much; Cressida unmasks him on the spot, obliges him to acknowledge that in asking less he desired more for his friend, and now she is blushing and indignant. Chaucer does not want her to yield to disquisitions and descriptions; all the cleverness of Pandarus is there only to make us better appreciate the slow inward working that is going on in Cressida's heart; her uncle will have sufficed to stir her; that is all, and, truth to say, that is something. She feels for Troilus no clearly defined sentiment, but her curiosity is aroused. And just then, while the conversation is still going on, loud shouts are heard, the crowd rushes, balconies are filled, strains of music burst forth; 'tis the return, after a victorious sally, of one of the heroes who defend Troy. This hero is Troilus, and in the midst of this triumphal scene, the pretty, frail, laughing, tender-hearted Cressida beholds for the first time her royal lover.