Chaucer’s whole point of view is that of the humorist. To the tragic writer things apparently trifling in themselves may be fraught with deep significance. A chance movement, a momentary impulse, may set fire to the train which brings about the catastrophe, or may reveal some subtle shade of character which it is essential that we should see. But the tragedian has no time to waste on trifles for their own sake. If Shakespeare shows us the sleepy porter unbarring the gate of Macbeth’s castle, or the grave-diggers of Elsinore singing at their work, it is not because he wants our thoughts to dwell on either the one or the other. They have their place as part of the tragedy, and it is the sense of tragedy, not the triviality of the incident which is uppermost in our mind. But the comic poet saunters gaily through life pausing to notice every trifle as he passes. He views the world as the unaccustomed traveller views a foreign country; the old women at their cottage doors, the peasants plodding behind their patient oxen in the field, the very names above the shops, all are interesting. There is no such thing as a dull person, the mere fashion in which a man walks or wears his clothes is worth recording, not because it throws any subtle light upon his character, but because it is unusual and therefore quaint, because, in fact, the unexpected is manifesting itself in these homely details.
Chaucer possesses this faculty of amused observation in a pre-eminent degree. Again and again he contrives to invest some perfectly trifling and commonplace incident with an air of whimsicality, and by so doing to make it at once realistic and remote. We are never wholly absorbed by what amuses us, in the sense that we are absorbed by what appeals to our tragic emotions. Laughter implies a certain detachment, whereas in tragedy we feel with those concerned with an intensity which often causes us to lose all consciousness of our own individuality. We may be surprised to find the tears in our eyes, but we are always conscious of our laughter.
This homely, whimsical point of view shows itself in a thousand minute touches. Friar John, in the Somnours Tale, goes to call on friend Thomas:—
And fro the bench he droof awey the cat,
And leyde adoun his potente[128] and his hat,
And eek his scrippe, and sette him softe adoun....
The rout pursues dan Russel the fox:—
And cryden, “Out! harrow! and weylawey!
Ha, ha, the fox!” and after him they ran,
And eek with staves many another man;
Ran Colle our dogge, and Talbot, and Gerland,
And Malkin, with a distaf in her hand;
Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges
So were they fered for berking of the dogges
And shouting of the men and wimmen eek,
They ronne so, hem thoughte hir herte brekke.
They yelleden as feendes doon in hellë;
The dokes[129] cryden as men wolde hem quelle;[130]
The gees for fere flowen[131] over the trees;
Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees....
There is nothing wildly farcical in any of this. Friar John does not sit on the cat; the men and dogs do not tumble over each other. The humour consists in the point of view which finds such incidents worth recording. It is not what he says, but the way he says it; not what he sees, but the way he sees it.
As to the sympathetic quality of humour, that is even more obvious in all Chaucer’s work. It is sympathy that lies at the bottom of a tolerance so wide that it hardly finds it necessary to forgive. When Chaucer needs a melodramatic villain or villainess such as Apius, or Alle’s mother, he can depict one, but except when it affords opportunity for comedy he usually touches an evil character but lightly. His heart lies in the pure poetry of such women as Constance and Dorigen, or in broadly comic effect: he has no desire to sound the depths of human nature or to dwell upon the darker and more terrible side of life. Shakespeare’s comedy is often touched with a suggestion of something faintly tragic. Even Falstaff is by no means a wholly comic figure, and the wisdom of Jaques, with all its affectation, contains a truth that goes beneath the surface. Chaucer seldom shows us the revealing power of comedy, but, like Shakespeare, he is not afraid to blend gaiety and gravity in the same person. From one point of view the Book of the Duchesse is surely the most cheerful elegy ever written. Chaucer does not tell off certain low-class characters for comic effect, he allows even the noblest and best a sense of humour. When we think of the serious and lachrymose heroines of romance, we feel that Chaucer’s women owe half their vitality to the fact that they are not afraid to laugh, that noble and high-minded as they are, they are part and parcel of the ordinary stuff of human life.
* * *
CHAPTER VI
CHAUCER’S DESCRIPTIVE POWER
From the earliest days of pre-Conquest literature, English poetry has always shown a strong feeling for nature. Nature, in those early days, has something wild and terrible about her; great forests, haunted by savage beasts and more savage men, stretch over the land; the sea-birds utter their plaintive cries as they hover above the desolate salt-marshes; ice-cold waves break on the iron-bound coast. Yet the sons of the sea-kings feel the call of the sea in their blood. They know the danger and the savagery of nature, but something in them responds to her relentless force, and the spell of the sea holds them. They may picture Heaven as a place where there is neither hail nor frost, and look forward to still waters and green pastures hereafter, but on earth the welter of the waves, and the strange calm of the rime-bound trees, draw them in spite of themselves. In the charms and riddles a gentler note is sometimes sounded as the poet watches a cloud of gnats “float o’er the forest heights,” or listens to the whirr of the wild-swan’s wings; but on the whole the impression left upon our minds is one of force rather than of peace, of man putting forth his might to subdue the wild strength of nature, and winning a bride by capture.
Often their descriptions of warfare gain an added force from the skilful use of some natural detail. The wan raven circles above the conflicting hosts, waiting for his prey; the water-snakes curve and curl in the seething waters into which Beowulf plunges to meet the monster. Here again, we have the same mingling of tragic imagination and fierce exultation.
They delight in picturing actual battle, in describing the hiss of the javelins through the air, and the gleam of the flashing blade. But while they often speak of the beauty of curiously wrought armour, or of the wealth of a king’s treasure, they show little power of presenting beauty for its own sake, and none at all of depicting the beauty of a woman. Their heroines are fair and gracious and bear the mead cup round the hall where the warriors feast, and unless they are in some way concerned with causing or avenging a quarrel, that is all there is to say about them.
To the Anglo-Normans this wilder and sterner aspect of nature seems to have made little appeal. Nature forms a charming background to many of the love-lyrics of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it is a far daintier and sunnier nature than that of the Old English poets. The time has come of the singing of birds:—
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu—
Sing cuccu![132]
In the romances certain definite conventions gradually establish themselves. It is always May morning when the hero rides into the green forest, and flowers, of uncertain species but gay colours, flaunt about his path. A description of a hunt, including minute details as to the proper method of dismembering the quarry, often finds a place—Tristram first wins King Mark’s affections by teaching his huntsmen the proper method of cutting up a stag. Detailed descriptions of elaborate banquets are also popular, but it is evident in these, as in the descriptions of hunting, that the author’s interest lies rather in the actual etiquette than in any pictorial effect. Nevertheless, the romances show a growing delight in colour and beauty. The hero and heroine must conform to a certain conventional standard, but the standard is by no means contemptible.
“Fair was he and slim and tall” (so we read of Aucassin in Mr. Bourdillon’s tran
slation) “and well fashioned in legs and feet and body arms. His hair was yellow and crisped small; and his eyes were grey and laughing; and his face was clear and shapely; and his nose high and well-set; and so endued was he with good condition, that there was none bad in him, but good only.”
And the fact that the gardens in which these gracious beings wander conform to no natural laws, does not prevent them from having a charm of their own. What could be more dainty than the following picture of a dutiful daughter reading to her parents (from the Chevalier au Lion by Chrétien de Troyes):—
Thrugh the hall sir Gawain gase[133]
Intil an orchard, playn pase;[134]
His maiden with him ledes he:
He fand a knyght under a tree,
Opon a cloth of gold he lay;
Before him sat a ful fayr may;[135]
A lady sat with them in fere[136]
The maiden read, that they myght here
A real romance in that place ...
Only occasionally do we hear any echo of that deeper note which sounded through the older poets, and catch a glimpse of winter, when
The leaves lancen from the lynde[137] and light(en) on the ground,
and
Unblithe on bare twigs sings many a bird
Piteously piping for pain of the cold.
(Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight.)
The battles and tournaments, accounts of which fill so many pages of the romances, for the most part show considerable sameness of treatment. The hero is beaten to his knees by the giant, or is almost overpowered by the poisonous breath of the dragon, when with a supreme effort he recovers himself and pierces his adversary in whatever his one vital spot may happen to be. Now and then some flash of ingenuity lights up the story, as when the Soldan’s daughter saves Roland and Oliver and their companions by flinging her father’s plate to the besieging army, thus at once distracting the attention of the soldiers and making her avaricious father ready to consent to any compromise; or some touch of real feeling breaks through all conventions, as when Sir Tristram, as he turns to meet Marhaus, kicks away his boat, since but one of them will need any means of leaving the isle; but for the most part the author follows the regular lines.
Chaucer, while he shows definite traces of the conventions of his day, in description, as in other matters, follows his own bent. Description for its own sake has little interest for him. Again and again he cuts short some passage which his contemporaries would have elaborated. In the Squieres Tale, for instance, a banquet occurs which affords admirable opportunity for that detailed account of ceremonial so dear to the hearts of medieval poets. Chaucer tells us that the steward ordered spices and wine, and then adds impatiently:—
What nedeth yow rehercen hir array?[138]
Ech man wot wel, that at a kinges feeste
Hath plentee, to the moste and to the leeste,
And deyntees mo than been in my knowing.
The dinner given by Deiphebus in Troilus and Criseyde is passed over equally perfunctorily:—
Come eek Criseyde, al innocent of this,
Antigone, hir sister Tarbe also;
But flee we now prolixitee best is,
For love of god, and lat us faste go
Right to the effect, with oute tales mo,
Why al this folk assembled in this place;
And lat us of hir saluinges pace.[139]
Even the hunt in the Book of the Duchesse is dismissed in little over a dozen lines:—
Whan we came to the forest-syde
Every man dide, right anoon,
As to hunting fil to doon.[140]
The mayster-hunte anoon, fot-hoot,[141]
With a gret horne blew three moot[142]
At the uncoupling of his houndes.
Within a whyl the hert [y]-founde is,
Y-halowed and rechased faste
Longe tyme; and at the laste
This hert rused[143] and stal away
Fro alle the houndes a prevy way ...
And then the poet turns to the real subject of his poem. Wordsworth himself does not make hunting seem a tamer occupation.
Nor are Chaucer’s descriptions of fighting much more convincing. He tells us coldly that Troilus and Diomede met in battle:—
With blody strokes and with wordes grete,
and that Troilus often beat furiously upon the helmet of Diomede, but the stanza which follows this announcement puts the matter in a nutshell:—
And if I hadde y-taken for to wryte
The armes of this ilk worthy mane,
Than wolde I of his batailles endyte.
But for that I to wryte first began
Of his love, I have seyd as that I can.
His worthy dedes, who-so list hem here,
Reed Dares, he can telle hem alle y-fere.[144]
It is emotion, not action, which interests him most. In the Knightes Tale, Palamon and Arcite
—foynen[145] ech at other wonder longe,
but Chaucer has no desire to follow the duel to its end. He remarks that they hew at each other till they are ankle deep in blood and then leaves them, still fighting, while he turns to Theseus. There is more vigour in the description of the tournament at the end. Here the clash of arms does echo through the verse, and the rapid narrative conveys a vivid sense of the heat and clamour of battle:—
Ther stomblen stedes stronge, and doun goth all.
He rolleth under foot as dooth a bal.
He foyneth on his feet with his tronchoun,
And he him hurtleth with his hors adoun ...
Possibly the poet was recalling his own fighting days in France. Certainly there is nothing stiff or conventional about this. But nowhere else does he give so lengthy and detailed a description of action, and even here it has a dramatic value, apart from its intrinsic interest, in that it enhances the suspense. Further, Chaucer, as we know, had himself probably superintended the erection of such lists, and the ceremonial of the tournament may well have had a special interest for him. His use of similes in describing action is worthy of note. He does not, like Spenser, constantly break the narrative by introducing some beautiful picture drawn from classical mythology, thus carrying the thoughts of the reader away from the actual situation at the moment. His similes are few—in this connection—and are so chosen that they add to the vividness of the whole impression. Palamon and Arcite fight like wild boars
That frothen whyte as foom for ire wood.
Of Arcite we are told,
There nas no tygre in the vale of Galgopheye,
Whan that hir whelp is stole, whan it is lyte,
So cruel on the hunte, as is Arcite.
Such comparisons are very different from Spenser’s:—
Like as the sacred Oxe that carelesse stands
With gilden hornes and flowry girlands crownd
Proud of his dying honor and deare bandes,
While th’ altars fume with frankincense arownd,
All suddeinly, with mortal stroke astownd,
Doth groveling fall, and with his streaming gore
Distaines the pillours and the holy grownd,
And the faire flowres that decked him afore:
So fell proud Marinell upon the pretious shore.
To Chaucer the interest does not lie in the pomp and pageantry, nor even in the chivalry of it all, but in the human emotion, in Emily waiting to know which of the lovers will claim her hand, in the knights filled with the lust of battle, in the quondam friends who seek each other’s life. Chivalry has, indeed, little glamour in Chaucer’s eyes. Gower’s story of Florent has a certain stateliness which is lacking in the Tale of the Wyf of Bathe. It has none of Chaucer’s digressions, none of the homeliness of his version. A description of the elf-queen and her jolly company dancing in the green meadows would perhaps be out of place in the mouth of the Wife of Bath, but it is evident that Chaucer sacrifices the dainty grace of Mab and Puck without a pang in order to allow himself a sly hit at the “limitours
and othere holy freres” who have replaced them.
The same principle underlies his description of people. In the Book of the Duchesse he gives us a detailed account of Blanche’s charms; probably he felt it incumbent on him to do so. She is fair, as a heroine should be, but even in this, the most conventional of all his descriptions, he contrives to give life and individuality to the conventional type:—
For every heer [up]on hir hede,
Soth to seyn, hit was not rede,
Ne nouther yelw, ne broun hit nas;
Me thoughte most lyk gold hit was.
And whiche eyen my lady hadde!
Debonair, goode, glade, and sadde,[146]
Simple, of good mochel,[147] noght to wyde;
······
And yet more-over, thogh alle tho
That ever lived were now a-lyve,
[They] ne sholde have founde to discryve
In al hir face a wikked signe;
For hit was sad, simple, and benigne.
This is no stereotyped model of feminine beauty, but a picture of the good fair White as she was when she lived.
Chaucer and His Times Page 11