The Life and Times of Chaucer

by John Gardner

  Chaucer develops his debate on government down through the Franklin’s Tale, where, as we said earlier, a balance of sorts is at last achieved. The husband in the tale works with full authority granted him by his wife and aimed at her benefit, exactly the arrangement recommended by the English political theorist Henry Bracton, who defines “the king’s pleasure” (quod principi placuit) as not the king’s private wish but the welfare of his bride the state. We need not trace here the argument of the tales or the functions, within the larger scheme, or the pilgrims’ rivalries. The point is merely that in the early nineties, when Richard was in full control of the government and was beginning to act upon his theory of monarchy, Chaucer responded with magnificent stories of the mimetic sort, fitting them to his larger purpose.

  We may doubt that he ever lost his ability to tell a dramatic story. The Pardoner’s Tale is certainly late—that magnificent retelling of an ancient plague legend, thick with gloomy and mysterious atmosphere: the jangling guitars in the dark, smoky tavern, the eerie old man in black whom the three drunken revelers meet, an old man who may perhaps be Death, may perhaps be the Wandering Jew, or an ancient spirit from Welsh legendry, or nothing more than a frightened old man (the blurring of the image is of course intentional). And the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, stories as perfect as any ever written, are also certainly late works.

  But though he had not forgotten how to write great stories, Chaucer became, in his last years, interested in another kind of art—an art rediscovered by important writers of our own time: the art of, so to speak, bad art. Perhaps the discovery was all but inevitable for a realist like Chaucer, once he had settled on the idea of a literary contest among the pilgrims. Someone, after all, had to lose miserably. Why not several?

  He had toyed with bad art and unreliable narrators before. The House of Fame is, among other things, a clownish Divine Comedy. And though the poet’s young friend John Lydgate admired it with monkish seriousness, Chaucer’s recent Tale of Melibeus was a parody of a popular bastard genre. A glance at how the Melibeus works will help us understand the comic impulse behind the later clowning poems.

  From the coupling of the tale genre and the rhetoric book, with its lists of figures and quotations, came that blear-eyed prodigy the quotation collection tied to narrative. In this genre, typically, a character decides on so-and-so and quotes every possible authority on the subject; his friend objects and, in turn, quotes authorities; another friend points out difficulties lodged in both points of view and, in his turn, quotes authorities…and so on. In the Tale of Melibeus Chaucer borrows an old and especially awkward quotation narrative and vastly expands it, making the absurdity more marked. Chaucer’s character Melibeus is so violently angry that he is determined to kill his enemies. In such a situation a man is not likely to stop for thought, but Melibeus stops to give a long string of quotations justifying his impulsive and wrathful plan. His wife (Prudence) advises that he seek outside advice and gives justifying quotations. He decides she may be right and gives quotations proving it, then seeks advice from his friends, who give him advice with innumerable quotations. Prudence disagrees with the friend’s advice and proves with quotations that Melibeus should listen to her instead. And so on.

  Here, obviously, Chaucer is creating intentionally bad art, originally no doubt a prank on the courtly audience that had assembled to hear him, expecting, as always, something vivid and delightful. Giving the Melibeus to his character “Chaucer” in the Canterbury Tales, and prefacing it with that character’s actually sly but seemingly pitiful appeal that the Host not once more interrupt him, Chaucer achieves a similar effect, this time a prank on the pilgrims.

  But though Chaucer had earlier played, on occasion, with intentional bad art, during his last years—living in virtual retirement, free to write, if he wished, for his own satisfaction—he began to work more earnestly with this curious new form he’d discovered, what I should like to call the “clown poem,” a work of art designed as inept imitation not of life but of art, a work which achieves the ends of art by indirection or—gleefully—not at all! Now and then he took poems he’d written long ago and no longer liked, such as the Monk’s Tale, and fitted them to his new purpose. More often he wrote magnificent new atrocities, such as the Physician’s Tale, the Tale of Sir Thopas, the Prioress’s Tale, or the Manciple’s Tale.

  Chaucer had been impressed for years by the questions posed by philosophical nominalism, especially the notion that no man can really understand or communicate with another. He may not have agreed with the nominalist’s solipsistic view, but the question was difficult and serious. He had worked with it, years ago, in the House of Fame. The symbolic superstructure of that poem—implied (as various critics have shown) by biblical allusions, quotations from the classics and the Divine Comedy, and so on—had been calculated to remind the reader of God’s vast and orderly plan of the universe; but “Geffrey,” the poem’s narrator, had been characterized as a dimwit incapable of even glimpsing that plan, though he benefited from it all the same. Later, in the first three tales of the Canterbury collection, Chaucer had dealt again with the problem, limited human intelligence and man’s tendency to impose his own character on the universe. The Knight’s Tale presents what we should probably take as Chaucer’s opinion on how the universe works: Divine Providence is just and merciful. But the drunken Miller immediately rises to “requite” the Knight, and gives a vision of the universe as he understands it, and then the Reeve tells a tale which presents a third opinion. For the Miller, people get exactly what they deserve, not more than they deserve, through the mercy of God, as the Knight would insist. And for the Reeve, whose chief motivation is spite (as he tells us), revenge is everything, so that the truth about the world is that people get the worst their enemies can do to them. Who is right, the Knight, the Miller, or the Reeve? And if an answer is possible, how do we convince the drunken Miller or the irascible old Reeve? That is precisely the nominalist argument: there is no common ground of humanity, no “human nature” as celebrated by Aquinas; no understanding. Then how can there be justice in the world, fair government, ordered society? That is the theme of the Canterbury Tales.

  No fourteenth-century nominalist used the word “relativism,” but every nominalist understood at least something of that queasy feeling we get while we laugh at a play by Samuel Beckett. The shock set off by the fourteenth century’s study of optics was not much different from the shock set off by men like Einstein in our own age. If there is no norm for human vision—or, in our own age, if time and space slither—what can we be sure of, what absolutes survive? For a devout Christian artist, the only absolutes, finally, are (1) God’s love and (2) man’s art, that is, the trustworthy emotion and perception of a man who carefully sets down what he sees. But nominalism teaches that all vision, even the artist’s vision, is mere opinion. One feels there are truths that can be discovered, not just affirmed (as we affirm, on scant evidence, God’s justice and love). But how can one defend them? All serious artists today, I think, face what nominalists faced: the impossibility of saying anything, though one knows, or at certain times briefly imagines, that there is something profoundly true that, somehow, one might say.

  Christian and optimistic to the soles of his feet, Chaucer could look with serenity on his own artistic helplessness. Even in the more conventional of his latest tales—the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, for instance—he could not present any noble value without sharp ironic undercutting, a kind of undercutting he hadn’t felt he needed, some years earlier, when he was writing of the ennobling effects of love on Troilus (Book III, 11. 1799 ff.). But in the late clown poetry, the act of writing itself is mocked as absurd.

  Chaucer’s Physician in the Canterbury Tales is a more or less decent, intensely serious man—as is any artist—yet the “work of art” he creates, the Physician’s Tale, is a catastrophe. Trying to present a lifelike character (he will later tell the pilgrims how to raise little girls as virtuous a
s this Virginia), he chooses exactly the wrong poetic devices, all of which make her a figure of art, not life. The Physician imagines Dame Nature—an allegorical abstraction—speaking of having created Virginia:

  “Lo! I, Nature,

  Thus kan I forme and peynte a creature,

  Whan that me list; who kan me countrefete?

  Pigmalion noght, though he ay forgeand bete,

  Or grave, orpeynte; for I dar wel seyn,

  Apelles, Zanzis, sholde werche in veyn [work]

  Outher to grave, orpeynte, orforge, orbete,

  If they presumed me to countrefete.…”

  This sort of thing goes on for several more lines; and when the tale itself comes, it is equally unconvincing: Chaucer carefully removes every feature of motivation in his source (a great work by Livy), introduces confusion and plot inconsistency, ghastly padding to fill out lines, and so on. When the Physician’s Tale was read—Chaucer performed it presumably in the priggish Physician’s voice and manner—his courtly audience must have been left in stitches. The Pardoner, who tells the following tale, is not, like the Physician, essentially upright (though rigidly moralistic); instead he is a self-confessed scoundrel, a homosexual and probably a eunuch who brazenly flaunts his abnormality and makes obscene advances to Harry Bailey himself, Host of the pilgrimage, stirring the innkeeper to rage. Yet base and offensive as he is, the work of art he presents is a masterpiece.

  In other late works, Chaucer explores the problem of art’s unreliability in other ways. In the Second Nun’s Tale he imitates an antique genre, in fact an antique set of religious emotions, those proper to the long-outmoded saint’s legend, and for textural richness superimposes on this ancient music an alchemistical allegory. If the poem had been written in, say, the ninth century, its subject would have been the life of St. Cecilia, and its central emotion would have been humble Christian devotion. Written near the close of the fourteenth century, the ancient genre itself, and the simple religious emotion that informed it, become the object of the poet’s exploration. In the Tale of Sir Thopas Chaucer parodies the most popular doggerel form of his day, the metrical romance, at once satirizing the form and (as Lewis Carroll would do with Robert Southey’s rhythms later) showing what kinds of material its rhythms cried out for. Again, in his most ambitious clown poem, the Manciple’s Tale, he bloats a simple fable about how the Crow became black into a comic masterpiece of pretentious nonsense. The poem closes with what might stand as Chaucer’s comment on the nominalist conflict—the urge to speak and the doubt that anything can be said. For sixty-two lines (in outrageous parody of some lines by John Gower), the Manciple speaks of the importance of not speaking (lest one bring evil on one’s head, as did the crow in the fable), babbling lines that might serve as a model of art so bad that, finally, it’s good.

  Lordyngës, by this ensample I yow preyë,

  Beth war, and taketh kep what that I seyë:

  Ne telleth neverë no man in youre lyf

  How that another man hath dight his wyf; [lain with]

  He wol yow haten mortally, certeyn.

  Daun Salomon, as wisë clerkes seyn,

  Techeth a man to kepen his tongë weel.

  But, as I seyde, I am noght textueel.

  But nathelees, thus taughtë me my damë:

  “My sonë, thenk on the crowe, a Goddës namë!

  My sonë, keep wel thy tonge, and keep thy freend.

  A wikked tonge is worsë than a feend;

  My sonë, from a feend men may hem blessë.

  My sonë, God of his endelees goodnessë

  Walled a tongëwith teeth and lippës ekë, [also]

  For man sholde hym avysë what he speekë.

  My sonë, ful oftë, for to muchë spechë

  Hath many a man been split, as clerkeës techë; [killed]

  But for litel speche avysely

  Is no man shent, to spekë generally. [hurt]

  My sonë, thy tongë sholdestow restreynë

  At allë tymes, but whan thou doost thy peynë

  To speke of God, in honour and preyerë.

  The firstë vertu, sone, if thou wolt leerë,

  Is to restreyne and kepë wel thy tongë;

  Thus lernë children whan that they been yongë.

  My son, of muchel spekyng yvele avysed,

  Ther lassë spekyng hadde ynough suffisëd,

  Comth muchel harm; thus was me toold and taught. [much]

  In muchel spechë synnë wanteth naught.

  Wostow whereof a rakel tongë serveth? [Knowest thou…rash]

  Right as a swerd forkutteth and forkerveth

  An arm a-two, my deerë sone, right so

  A tongë kutteth freendshipe al a-two.

  A jangler is to God abhomynable.

  Reed Salomon, so wys and honurable;

  Reed David in his psalmës, reed Senekkë.

  My sonë, spek nat, but with thyn heed thou bekkë. [nod]

  Dissimule as thou were deef, if that thou heerë

  A janglerë speke of perilous mateerë.

  The Flemyng seith, and lerne it if thee lestë, [please]

  That litel janglyng causeth muchel restë.

  My sone, if thou no wikked word hast seyd,

  Thee thar nat drede for to be biwreyd; [betrayed]

  But he that hath mysseyd, I dar wel sayn,

  He may by no wey clepe his word agayn. [call back]

  Thyng that is seyd is seyd, and forth it gooth,

  Though hym repente, or be hym neverë so looth.

  He is his thral to whom that he hath sayd

  A tale of which he is now yvele apayd.

  My sonë, be war, and be noon auctour newë

  Of tidyngës, wheither they been false or trewë.

  Whereso thou come, amongës hye or lowë,

  Kepë wel thy tonge, and thenk upon the crowë.”

  This late, intentionally clumsy poetry has not been much admired until recently. Perhaps it was not much admired in Chaucer’s day; we will probably never know. But whatever his friends and patrons may have thought of it, writing such poetry, and chuckling over its awfulness, was one of the pleasures of the poet’s peaceful old age.

  Though his moment of success was destined to be brief, by the mid-nineties Richard had made himself a popular king—if one criticized for arrogance—and seemed, with Gaunt’s help, to have patched up relations with his magnates. Scotland was quiet; Gaunt and Gloucester, along with Thomas Percy and Chaucer’s friend (God’s traitor) Sir Lewis Clifford, had brought off a four-year truce with France (a truce that would later be extended); Richard’s pacifist policy had brought in a boom of prosperity, though most lords seemed not to understand at the time that peace and the new prosperity were related; and Richard himself had achieved peace in Ireland, almost without bloodshed, honoring and knighting those barbaric wildmen, as the chronicle writers of England called them, and pardoning the malcontents who’d risen against him, even offering to admit native Irish kings and chiefs to full legal status under the crown. Though some Englishmen were horrified, no one could deny the effectiveness of Richard’s strategy. The former appellants seemed, in general, to be reconciled now to Richard’s rule, partly because, in the economic boom, they prospered by it—or all were reconciled but Arundel, still defiant and suspicious, and rumored to be secretly in support of local rebellions against Lancaster and Gloucester in 1394. Arundel openly attacked John of Gaunt in parliament for his undue access to the king (that age-old and, of course, legitimate complaint), his overbearing manners in council and parliament, his overly self-enriching acquisition of the duchy of Aquitaine, his costly and self-serving Spanish mission, and the peace treaty he was at the time engineering with France. Richard ferociously defended his uncle and his own pacific policy against Arundel’s old-fashioned and suicidal blood lust, forcing Arundel to groveling apology and frightening him into requesting, a short while later, a special charter of pardon for his earlier misdeeds. Despite the charter, all was not forgiven and for
gotten on either side. When Queen Anne died that summer—throwing the king into a paroxysm of grief—old Arundel failed to join the funeral procession from Sheen (the greatest funeral ever seen in England) and appeared late at Westminster Abbey with a request, outrageous under the circumstances, that he be permitted to withdraw from the service. Richard struck him to the ground in a fury, “polluting the sanctuary with Arundel’s blood,” ordered him jailed in the Tower for weeks, and later forced him to take an oath of good behavior with bond set, if Arundel should break that oath, at an incredible £40,000 ($9,600,000).

  But Arundel was, for a time, the exception. Nottingham (Thomas Mowbray) had been brought around long since and, by Richard’s policy of conciliation, made warden of the east march of Scotland and captain of Calais; Warwick had retired from politics; and Gaunt’s troublesome son Henry—one of the lords appellant who had worked against Richard and arranged what Gaunt, among others, saw as the murder of Richard’s friends—was no longer active, being frequently abroad, fighting with great success and joy in whatever small battles broke out on land or sea, building up a glorious reputation. Though the king’s pacifist policy (frequently blamed on Gloucester and Gaunt by contemporaries) was not itself popular, no one could find strong grounds for denying the advantage of peace under a crown buttressed—as it was expressed in that original coronation rite—by family solidarity and the lords’ consent. As for Gaunt, his natural inclination to loyalty was powerfully reinforced now by need. Constance of Castile had died in March 1394; he could hope for no better than the role of an English baron. He played that role carefully and wisely, as well as theatrically, making himself chief advocate of Richard’s policy—and was duly rewarded. In January 1396, he married Katherine Swynford; parliament granted legitimacy to their children, and Gaunt’s holdings and liberties were greatly enlarged. Except in Gaunt’s own heart, the misdeeds of his heir, Henry Bolingbroke, as one of the appellants, appeared to have been forgotten. Richard’s position was further strengthened in that he also, by grants and favors, made at least some friends among the lesser territorial aristocracy, the class which furnished parliament’s knights of the shire.