Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

  O gode god! how gentil and how kinde

  Ye semed by your speche and your visage

  The day that maked was our mariage;

  and surely no direct accusation of cruelty could show with equal clearness how deeply she has suffered. They are great-hearted women, before whose innate nobility the persecutions and unjust accusations to which they are subjected drop into nothingness.

  When Chaucer deliberately sets out to draw a saint instead of a woman, he is less successful. Our sympathies are with Blanche, as she sings and dances so gaily, rather than with the preternaturally pious Virginia, who at the age of twelve often feigns sickness in order to

  ... fleen the companye

  Wher lykly was to treten of folye,[107]

  As is at festes, revels, and at daunces ...

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

  The Seconde Nonnes Tale contains even less of human interest. Cecilia is neither more nor less than the mouthpiece of the Christian religion, and the miracles that she works and the sermons that she preaches leave the reader unmoved. The music of the verse has a charm of its own, and Chaucer’s most left-handed work is yet the work of a genius, but a comparison of Cecilia with Constance soon shows the difference between a real woman and an embodied ideal. The miraculous element, which is subordinated to the human interest in the Man of Lawes Tale, dominates the whole of the Seconde Nonnes Tale, and the inevitable sameness of the various conversions further detracts from its vividness.

  In Cressida Chaucer had painted a woman of the butterfly type. In the Canterbury Tales he gives us a certain number of actually immoral women, such as Alisoun and May, but he paints no second picture of pretty helpless coquettishness. The heroines of the less savoury tales are coarser in fibre and for the most part lower in the social scale than Calkas’ daughter, and their stories are of mere sensuous self-indulgence with none of the charm and poetry which marks the tale of Troilus and Cressida. One character alone recalls Chaucer’s earlier heroine. The Prioress is very much what a fourteenth-century Cressida would have been if her friends had placed her in a convent instead of finding her a husband. She has the same daintiness and trimness, the same superficial tender-heartedness. It is difficult to imagine that her sympathy, like Canace’s, would take the practical form of applying salves or binding up wounds, but:—

  She was so charitable and so pitous,

  She wolde wepe if that she sawe a mous

  Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.

  Her table manners are excellent, and she wears her veil with an air:—

  Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was.

  Her silver brooch, with its Amor vincit omnia, betrays a naïve interest in her personal appearance. She is never brought into contact with the more passionate side of life as Cressida is, and her seclusion from the world has given her a touch of primness which combines oddly with her little affectations. The contrast between her worldliness and that of the Monk is complete. He is gross, jovial, self-indulgent; she is delicate, mincing, conventional. Like Cressida she would always follow the line of least resistance, though it would cause her genuine—if but momentary—distress to give pain to anyone. She is too well-bred ever to think for herself, and too innocent and simple-minded not to accept life as it is offered her. She tells her story with real tenderness and feeling, and it is evident that the atmosphere of the cloister in no wise irks her. It is impossible to regard her as a pattern nun, but equally impossible to judge her harshly. Both she and Cressida have something childlike about them, and it seems out of place to try them by the ordinary standards.

  Of a very different type are Chaucer’s practical, bustling housewives, amongst whom the Wife of Bath and Dame Pertelote stand pre-eminent. The Wife of Bath is a capable, active, pushing woman, with plenty of courage and plenty of self-confidence. She is well-to-do and has a fitting sense of her own dignity and importance, but she has no idea of letting dignity stand in the way of enjoyment, and is quite ready to take her part in the rough jests of the company. Comely of face and plump of person, she dresses well and is quite prepared to make the most of her attractions. The prologue to her tale shows that she has plenty of shrewd mother-wit. Her view of matrimony is characteristic. She recognises the “greet perfeccioun” of celibacy, but since all men and women are not suited to such a life, she is impatient of the idea that they should marry but once, and she quotes the Scriptures most aptly for her purpose. Her present husband is her fifth, and when he dies she has every intention of marrying again:—

  “I nil envye no virginitee;”

  she cries,

  “Let hem be breed of pured whete-seed,

  And lat us wyves hoten barly-breed,”[108]

  for barley-bread is by no means to be despised. In fact she is the epitome of common-sense, and her confidence in her own opinion enables her to bear contradiction good-humouredly enough. Her methods with her various husbands were simple: three she bullied and brow-beat, one she paid back in his own coin. The fifth, who had the sense to beat her, was the only one for whom she had any respect, and even he had finally yielded her

  ... the governance of hous and lond

  And of his tonge and of his hond also.

  It is the picture of a violent, coarse—but not wholly ill-natured—woman, who despises bookishness and thoroughly enjoys good ale and good company. She has no morals and no ideals, though she loves to go

  To vigiles and to processiouns,

  To preching eek, and to thise pilgrimages,

  To pleyes of miracles and mariages,

  but her genial good-fellowship makes her a pleasant enough companion.

  Dame Pertelote is drawn with even greater skill. The impatience with which she listens to Chauntecleer’s account of his dream is just what we should expect of a sensible, unimaginative, middle-class woman, whose own nerves and digestion were in excellent order, if her husband came to her with a long story of a supernatural warning. Dreams, she says, are the natural consequence of over-eating; the best thing he can do is to take some of the herbs she recommends, and when he has pecked these up, “right as they growe” and “ete hem in” he will find all his nervousness and depression disappear. Chauntecleer is furious at being treated with such scant respect and proceeds to overwhelm her with examples of dreams that have come true. His wise wife, who knows when to hold her tongue, makes no attempt to answer him back, but is evidently only too thankful when at last, being convinced that he has established his point, he suffers his attention to be distracted and turns to the pleasanter business of love-making. Pertelote is in fact typical of the good wives of her class, as the Wife of Bath is of the bad. She is no more a heroine than the Wife of Bath is a villainess, but the one studies her husband’s comforts and thoroughly understands how to make him happy, while the other cares for nothing but her own amusement. Pertelote’s lamentations when Chauntecleer is borne off are in the best taste. Restraint was considered no virtue in a medieval widow, and Pertelote very properly screams loudly and persistently. Nor does wifely affection go unrewarded. The “sely widwe” and her daughters who own the hen-yard

  Herden thise hennes cry and maken wo,

  And out at dores steten they anoon,

  with the result that Chauntecleer is saved.

  It is this power of making characters at once typical and individual which marks true dramatic genius. Browning’s men and women reveal their innermost souls to us, we see them with a passionate vividness which is almost startling in its brilliancy, but all the while we
are conscious of the intensity of their individuality. The conspicuous thing about them is that which marks them out from the rest of the world. The commonplace novelist or dramatist, on the other hand, gives us mere types of vice and virtue. Mr. Jerome’s gallery of Stageland characters—the hero, the heroine, the comic Irishman, the good old man, and the rest—is scarcely caricature. It is hardly necessary to give them names, the same types have been recurring again and again for many a long year, and are likely to continue to recur as long as there are cheap books and cheap theatres. But the great masters of character-drawing contrive to show us the individual at once as a unit and as part of the whole. We see the peculiar idiosyncrasies of this or that person, and we are conscious, not only of a subtle bond between ourselves and them which enables us to see things from their point of view, but of their relation to human nature in general and to their own class in particular.

  * * *

  CHAPTER V

  CHAUCER’S HUMOUR

  Critics may be divided in opinion as to Chaucer’s right to be called the Father of English poetry, but there can be no question that he is the first great English humorist. As far back as Henry III’s reign fabliaux had been imported from France, but they took no real root in English soil, and though their coarse jests and indecent situations were fully appreciated by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century readers, they never rose above the level of collections of “merrie tales” and made no pretensions to originality or literary style. The same stories were repeated again and again, with slight variations, and are often to be found in Indian or Arabian versions as well as in French and English. Chaucer alone, showed that it was possible to see in them a revelation of human nature. The romances, as has been said, were far more French than English, and, even so, comparatively few of them show any flicker of humour. Aucassin and Nicolette stands out as a conspicuous exception, but this is pure French, and the more English romances, such as Guy of Warwick or Bevis of Hampton, take everything with intense seriousness. It is true that the Continental animal epic had begun to make its influence felt in England, but it was still the Continental epic: it belonged to the days of literary free-trade before the national spirit made itself felt in literature. Satire, it is true, had long since made its appearance in England, but except for rude popular rhymes and an occasional poem of greater pretensions—such as the Land of Cokaygne—it was in Latin, and had nothing distinctively English about it. In the Miracle Plays, it is true, we find that mixture of shrewd common-sense and real feeling, of comedy and tragedy, which we are accustomed to regard as characteristically English, but though they had been popular in England for many years before Chaucer began to write, the best of them date from the fifteenth century, and the comic element in the earlier plays seems chiefly to have consisted in rough-and-tumble farce. It was left for Chaucer to show the true meaning and value of the comic point of view, and at the same time to embody the characteristics of a nation which had but recently awakened to the consciousness of its own individuality.

  To say that humour is the most subtle and illusive of qualities, is to utter a truism. Certain situations are in themselves necessarily and essentially tragic. The slaying of parent by child, or child by parent; a great shipwreck involving terrible loss of life; any sudden and overwhelming catastrophe must always bring with it a sense of horror. But comedy depends on point of view rather than on situation. An absurdity of dress or manner which would cause us to smile under normal circumstances, would cease to be amusing if it indicated dangerous insanity: a man falling off the roof of a house might go into the most ridiculous attitudes without in the least stirring the spectator’s sense of humour. It is this which makes it difficult to accept Professor Bergson’s most interesting and suggestive theory of the mechanical nature of comedy as wholly satisfactory. And again, while such tragic incidents as have been suggested appeal to every normal human being, what amuses one person may leave another absolutely untouched. We all know the blank sensation of having our best story received with stony politeness, and the despair of trying to explain a joke. Certain things, however, do appeal in greater or less degree to the majority of people, and among these is the element of unexpectedness. The whole point of the modern musical comedy consists in making the actor behave as no sane person ever dreamed of behaving in actual life. If it were the fashion to enter a room in a series of cart-wheels we should see nothing funny in it. The audience roars with laughter when the elderly gentleman sits on his hat, because hats are not intended to be used as cushions. Nor is this element of unexpectedness confined to mere farce. It constitutes more than half the point of a brilliant repartee or play upon words. The child’s misuse of terms is amusing because it suggests something which would never have occurred to us. And it is this which underlies the assertion that humour consists in incongruity. True humour, however, contains far more than this. If comedy plays on the surface of life, its greatest exponents bring home to us the fact that that surface covers a depth. It is no accident that causes Shakespeare’s comedies to deepen in tone until they become well-nigh indistinguishable from tragedies, or that leads Chaucer to introduce a Pandarus into the tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde. Comedy has a double value. It is amusing, and it is also a bond which connects us with everyday life. It keeps tragedy from soaring into worlds peopled exclusively by heroes and heroines of almost superhuman greatness, and romance from dwelling wholly in a land of faery. Had the poets of the Restoration ever dared to view their heroes from the comic point of view we should have been spared the bombastic grandiloquence of their Almanzors and Osmyns. Had Rosalind no sense of humour, were Touchstone and Jaques non-existent, As You Like It might still be a charming forest idyll, but it would cease to have any hint of realism.

  Chaucer’s comedy touches both extremes: it includes the most elementary, and the most subtle forms, and though he never rises to the height of the great Shakespearean dramas, he does reveal possibilities hitherto undreamed of in English literature. For the sake of clearness it may be well to consider his comedy under four heads: farce, wit, satire, humour proper.

  (1) Farce.—Farce may be defined as that form of comedy which makes least appeal to the intelligence, which is, in fact, almost wholly physical. An imbecile may be incapable of realising that there is anything unusual in wearing straws in one’s hair and therefore may not find the spectacle amusing, but it needs but a very low order of intelligence to appreciate such physical peculiarity—hence the popularity of costume songs, and pantomime generally, which call for no mental effort on the part of the audience. But while farce is undoubtedly the lowest form of comedy, it does not necessarily follow that it is to be despised. The greatest authors do not disdain to make use of it, only they keep it subordinate to other interests. Shakespeare contrives to blend farce with character-study in a way that is truly marvellous. Falstaff’s fatness is eminently farcical, and yet it is something more—a starveling Sir John would be a wholly different person. It is farce touched with humour. Dogberry and Verges are of a different species from the comic policeman of musical comedy.

  In Chaucer we find both forms of farce. The “sely carpenter” of the Milleres Tale provides plenty of incident well suited to tickle the most elementary sense of the comic. The picture of the unfortunate John victualling his tub in readiness for a second edition of Noah’s flood, and sitting in it, slung up to the ceiling, “awaytinge on the reyn,” is irresistibly funny, and it is easy to fancy the delight of the audience when, thinking the flood has come, he cuts the cord and comes bumping on to the floor; for the truest farce of all is the practical joke which makes someone else ridiculous. All the coarser tales are full of such episodes. It would make no difference if the incidents were transferred from one tale to another, they have no subtle connection with the personality of those involved in them; the absurdity lies in the actual situation, and is exactly on a level with the rough-and-tumble fights between Noah and his wife, which proved so popular in the Miracle Plays, or the tossing of Mak in a blanket in t
he well-known Townley Mystery.

  The portrait of the drunken Cook contains farce of a somewhat higher order. He is a most unattractive person, and from any other point of view would be merely repulsive. But humour, while it cuts through false sentiment, not infrequently softens down the harsher lines in a character. There is no bitterness in true laughter; we cannot wholly despise what amuses us. In a tract the Cook and the Wife of Bath, the Friar and the Pardoner, would serve as awful warnings. In the Canterbury Tales they show an extraordinary power of disarming criticism and worming themselves into our affections:—

  The Cook of London, whyl the Reve spak,

  For joye, him thoughte, he clawed him on the bak.

  He is a genial rascal after all, and we almost resent his having so unfortunately appropriate a name as Hogge. When he falls asleep as he rides and rolls off his horse our sympathies are with him, though we fully appreciate the force of the Maunciple’s plea that he shall not be permitted to tell his tale. The picture of the rest of the pilgrims shoving him to and fro in their efforts to mount him again, is farce of the simplest and most primitive kind, but Roger himself is a live man, not a mere occasion of mirth in others.

  The Wyf of Bath, again, is a foul-mouthed, coarse-grained woman, selfish and self-indulgent. Her prologue shows an amazing ignorance of the meaning of clean living, and her piety merely serves as an excuse for seeing the world. Yet such is the power of the comic point of view that it is quite impossible to judge her from the conventional moral standpoint. Comedy lays stress on her good-humour and her sense, and, above all, on her power of amusing the company. Compare her for one moment with Mrs. Sinclair in Clarissa, or the old hag in Dombey and Son, and the effect produced by comic treatment at once becomes evident. It is not that it dulls our moral sense, but it gives us a peculiar tolerance of its own. Instead of judging all men from our own particular plane, we learn to see these illiterate and common folk as they see each other, and we find them extraordinarily human after all.