Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/465

Rh CHAUCER 453 1ale, he admits, told in a churlish manner, and he does not -wish to be responsible for it. &quot; Every gentle wight I pray For Goddes love, deemeth not that I say Of evil intent ; but for I must rehearse Their tales all, be they better or worse, Or elles falsen some of my matter &quot; If gentle readers do not like it, they may turn over the leaf, and choose another tale ; there is plenty &quot; of storial thing that toucheth gentillesse.&quot; They must not blame him for repeating this churlish tale ; &quot;the Miller is a churl, ye know well this,&quot; and such tales are in his way. Gentle readers must not take it too seriously ; &quot; men should not make earnest of game ; &quot; it is, after all, only for their amusement that he thus exhibits to them the humours of the lower orders. Such is the elaborate apology that Chaucer makes for introducing into his verse anything inconsistent with the sentiments of chivalry. It may be said that it is all a humorous pretence ; and so no doubt it is, still it is characteristic that the pretence should be of so courtly a tons. All through the Canterbury Tales Chaucer is very careful to remember that he was writing for a courtly audience, studious to guard against giving offence to the chivalrous mind. He contrives that the gentles shall mix with the churls without sustaining any loss of dignity ; they give the churls their company, and with polite compliance let them have their own gross will, but they never lay aside the restraints of their own order. Every here and there is some trace of deference to them, to show that their ribald companions have not wholly forgotten themselves, and are only receiving a saturnalian licence for the time. Nothing is done to throw any disrespect on the gentle order; its members the Knight, the Squire, the Monk, the Prioress, the Second Nun ; and the professional men the Lawyer, the Doctor, the Clerk admit no ribaldry into their tales, and no ribald tales are told about them. The ribaldry is confined to the meaner members of the company, the Reeve, the Miller, the Friar, the Summoner, the Wife of Bath ; the narrators as well as the subjects of the ribald tales are of churlish and not of gentle position. The Canterbury Tales are really in their underlying design an exposition of chivalrous sentiment, thrown into- relief by contrast with its opposite. The spirit of chivalry is the vital air of all Chaucer s creations, the rain, the wind, and the sun which have quickened their germ and fostered their growth. We to whom the chivalrous spirit, at least in the fantastic developments of its vigorous mediaeval youth, is an historical thing are apt to overlook this. There is so much on the surface of Chaucer s poems, such vivacity of movement, such tender play of feeling, such humour, such delight in nature, in green leaves and sweet air, sun shine and bird singing, that few of us care to look beneath. The open air, on the breezy hillside or by the murmuring brook, seems the only proper atmosphere for such a poet. There, no doubt, with sun and wind contending playfully to divert us from the printed pages, there perhaps more than anywhere else, Chaucer is a delightful companion ; but it is the duty of the dry-as-dust critic to remind us that Chaucer s sweet verses were first read under wholly different conditions, in tapestried chambers, to the gracious ear of embroidered lords and ladies. It was from such an audience that Chaucer received in a vapour what he poured back in a flood. This is the secret of his exquisite courtliness of phrase, his unfailing tone of graceful defer ence, his protestations of ignorance and lack of cunning, his tender handling of woeful love-cases, the gentle play fulness of his satire, the apologetic skill with which he introduces a broader and more robust humanity into his verse. If you place yourself within the circle for which the poet wrote, you see the smile play on sweet lips as he proceeds ; you see the tear gather in the eye ; you see the needle laid aside, as the mind of the fair listener is trans ported to the poet s flowery mead, or plied more briskly as she bends over her work to conceal her laughter at his more vulgar adventures. It was because Chaucer wrote for such an audience that his picture of the life of the time, various and moving as it is, is so incomplete on one side. There was more than romancing in green fields and Canterbury pilgriming in the travelled times in which Chaucer lived ; there were wars, plagues, insurrections, much misery and discontent. But for the disagreeable side of the 14th century we must go to the writer of Piers the Plowman ; we find little trace of it in Chaucer. The outside of the walls of the Garden of Mirth is painted with horrible and squalid figures, Ire, Envy, Covetice, Avarice, Felony, Villany, Sorrow, Eld, and Poverty; but no such figures are admitted within the gates ; the concierge is Idleness ; the chief inmates are Love, Sweetlooking, Beauty, Richesse, Largesse, Franchise, and Courtesy ; and Mirth and Gladness are the master and mistress of the ceremonies. All Chaucer s works are steeped in the nectar of the court; the perfume of chivalrous sentiment breathes from them all. It is impossible, as we have said, to determine strictly the order of their composition, though it is very easy to distinguish his earlier from his later work. There is a passage in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women which settles the position of that poem. The poet there pretends to have an interview with the king and queen of love, as he is out on a May morning to worship the daisy. The king challenges his worthiness to do homage to this his own flower, and upbraids him with having translated the Romance of the Rose, which (in its second part at least) is a heresy against love s law, and also with having told the story of Cresside, and thrown discredit on women. But the queen of love, Alcestis, speaks up for the poet , perhaps, she pleads, he was ordered to do these translations and durst not refuse ; and he had done good service by extending the praise of love among the unlearned folk, for &quot; Ho made the book that hight the house of Fame, And eke the death of Blanche the Duchess, And the Parliament of Fowles as I guess, And all the lova of Palamon and Arcite, Of Thebes, though the story is knowen lite ; And many a hymne for your holy days That highten Ballads, Roundels, Virelays. &quot; The translation of the Romance of the Rose was probably the- first of these works. It may have been written soon after or during his captivity in France, when he was a youth of twenty, but there is no appreciable difference of style between it and the Book of the Duchess, which if it commemorates, as there is every reason to believe, the death of the first wife of John of Gaunt, must have been written after 1369, when Chaucer was twenty-nine. The idea of writing in the vulgar tongue may have been suggested to him by the example- of Dante. The House of Fame is probably later than the Book of the Duchess. The Court of Love is not mentioned by name in the above list, but it may be referred to in the following lines of the prologue : &quot; Hast thou not in a book lyeth in thy chest The greate goodness of the Queen Alceste That turned was into a dayeseye ! &quot; Alcestis is, under Venus, the lady and queen of the Court of Love. It is easy to conceive why Chaucer should have kept the Court of Love in his chest. The tide of Puritanic religious sentiment which was destined to sweep into temporary oblivion the airy structures of the chivalric imagination had already in the middle of Chaucer s life begun to rise. In the Court of Love he fully accepted the troubadour notion of love and marriage,