In Search of Chaucer 9781442632561

Table of contents :
THE ALEXANDER LECTURES
PREFACE
CONTENTS
1. SO FULL OF SHAPES
2. IN AND OUT OF DREAMS
3. BY DAY
4. BY CANDLELIGHT

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IN SEARCH OF CHAUCER

THE ALEXANDER LECTURESHIP The Alexander Lectureship was founded in honour of Professor W. J. Alexander, who held the Chair of English at University College, University of Toronto, from 1889 to 1926. Each year the Lectureship brings to the University a distinguished scholar or critic to give a course of lectures on a subject related to English Literature.

IN SEARCH OF CHAUCER Bertrand H. Bronson

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1960,

BY

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS PRINTED IN CANADA REPRINTED, 1963

DRAWINGS BY ANTJE LINGNER

THE ALEXANDER LECTURES (Unless otherwise indicated the lectures have been published by the University of Toronto Press) 1929-30 L. F. CAZAMIAN: "Parallelism in the Recent Development of English and French Literature." Included in the author's Criticism in the Making (Macmillan, 1929) 1930-31 H. W. GARROD: The Study of Poetry (Clarendon, 1936) 1931-32 IRVING BABBITT: "Wordsworth and Modern Poetry." Included as "The Primitivism of Wordsworth" in the author's On Being Creative (Houghton, 1932) 1932-33 W. A. CRAIGIE: The Northern Element in English Literature (1933) 1933-34 H. J. C. GRIERSON: "Sir Walter Scott." Included in Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Constable, 1938) 1934-35 G. G. SEDGEWICK: Of Irony, Especially in Drama ( 1934, 1948) 1935-36 E. E. STOLL: Shakespeare's Young Lovers (Oxford, 1937) 1936-37 F. B. SNYDER: Robert Burns, His Personality, His Reputation, and His Art (1936) 1937-38 D. NICHOL SMITH: Some Observations on EighteenthCentury Poetry (1937, 1960) 1938-39 CARLETON W. STANLEY: Matthew Arnold (1938) 1939-40 J. DOUGLAS N. BUSH: The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939, 1957) 1940-41 No lectures given 1941-42 H. J. DAVIS: Stella, a Gentlewoman of the Eighteenth Century (Macmillan, 1942) 1942-43 H. GRANviLLE-BARKER:''C0r/0¿0;iM.y." Included in the author's Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol. il (Princeton, 1947) 1943-44 F. P. WILSON: Elizabethan and Jacobean (Clarendon, 1945) 1944-45 p. O. MATTHIESSEN: Henry James, the Major Phase (Oxford, 1944) 1945-46 S. C. CHEW: The Virtues Reconciled, an Iconographicnl Study (1947) 1946-47 MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON: Voyages to the Moon (Macmillan, 1948) [v]

THE

ALEXANDER

LECTURES

1947-48 G. B. HARRISON: "Shakespearean Tragedy." Included in the author's Shakespeare's Tragedies (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951) 1948-49 E. M. W. TILLYARD: Shakespeare's Problem Plays (1949) 1949-50 E. K. BROWN: Rhythm in the Novel (1950) 1950-51 MALCOLM W. WALLACE: English Character and the English Literary Tradition (1952) 1951-52 R. S. CRANE: The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953) 1952-53 No lectures given 1953-54 F. M. SALTER: Mediaeval Drama in Chester (1955) 1954-55 ALFRED HARBAGE: Theatre for Shakespeare (1955) 1955-56 LEON EDEL: Literary Biography (1957) 1956-57 JAMES SUTHERLAND: On English Prose (1957) 1957-58 HARRY LEVIN: The Question of Hamlet (Oxford, 1959) 1958-59 BERTRAND H. BRONSON: In Search of Chaucer (1960) 1959-60 GEOFFREY BULLOUGH: Mirror of Minds: Changing Psychological Beliefs in English Poetry (1962)

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PREFACE

THE PAGES to follow were delivered in April, 1959, as the Alexander Lectures in English, at the University of Toronto. Apart from verbal corrections, they have been left unchanged, in the belief that they could hardly be made much more substantial without sacrificing the character and movement of cursory discourse. To try to make them less vulnerable would have meant to build again from the foundations. Nevertheless, I shall be sorry if the tone of them strike the reader as over-confident and assertive out of blindness to the risk of opposing arguments. In so roving a survey, it is oppressive to tag with detailed references the points of agreement with one's predecessors, even if one could accurately recall them, or distinguish between coincidence of opinion and unconscious echo. The body of Chaucerian exegesis is now so large that one can hardly have read it all, much less re-read it for an immediate occasion. Unhappily embedded in the mind, moreover, is a proclivity to forget—even an inability to recognize— that what is manifest as soon as it is pointed out was not already present in the receiver's consciousness; so that we often fail to credit our most convincing teachers. That I can have escaped this sin of unintentional ingratitude I do not for a moment imagine. One can only acknowledge that one's ideas of Chaucer's achievement have doubtless been qualified, probably been diverted into new and more rewarding paths, and certainly been enlarged, deepened, and clarified, by the sum of one's reading over many years; and [vii]

PREFACE

consequently pay general and humble thanks for this essential indebtedness, and for the inestimable privilege of working within a scholarly tradition. "It is not uncommon," writes Johnson, "for those who have grown wise by the labour of others to add a little of their own, and overlook their masters. Addison is now despised by some who perhaps would never have seen his defects, but by the lights which he afforded them." I may be allowed to hope that I have profited a little by the labours of many masters who, if not always named, have not been despised. One learns through disagreement, it must be added, as well as in assent. It is a pleasant duty to pay thanks also to my hospitable hosts, the President and faculty of the Department of English of the University which sponsored these lectures; and especially to Professor A. S. P. Woodhouse and his colleagues of University College, who took so much trouble to fill my sojourn among them with agreeable memories. B. H. B.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

V

1. SO FULL OF SHAPES

3

2. IN AND OUT OF DREAMS

34

3. BY DAY

60

4. BY CANDLELIGHT

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IN SEARCH OF CHAUCER

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1. SO FULL OF SHAPES PROBABLY NO ENGLISH POET—not even Shakespeare—has been the subject, for at least a century, of more debate and disagreement than Geoffrey Chaucer. Himself the least contentious of men, his innocent works have ironically become the favourite plot of ground whereon scholars have met in tournament, until the lists are now so full that the numbers can scarcely try the cause, let alone hide the slain. Is there anything about Chaucer's works that can be said at present to be finally settled? Even the principle of his metrical norms, which a century ago Child seemed to have established once for all, has recently been challenged anew. The dates of his works are all still undetermined or approximate. In the contemporary historical records, among the two hundred or so references to Geoffrey's "doings, up and down," there is no mention of his poems, or even that he was a writer. The occasion of The Book of the Duchess, from early tradition and internal evidence, is generally agreed upon; but the artistic rating of that work still fluctuates widely and its internal contradictions are in active debate. Of The Parliament of Fowls, even the primary [3]

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intention (and much more the occasion) is yet hotly disputed, after over three-quarters of a century, and evokes new hypotheses and corrective essays as regularly as the young sun reappears in the Ram—and far oftener than Venus illumines the northwest; although, in 1907, Tatlock praised Koch for having in 1877 identified the eagles in the poem, thereby establishing "one of the two pivotal and unshaken dates in the chronology of all Chaucer's poems."1 But where are the snows of yesteryear? About the purpose, the meaning, the basic structure, the biographical connections, of The House of Fame, there is today not the least critical accord. Anyone may pick up the poem tomorrow with the excitement of a pioneer. Explanations of the Epilogue of Troilus and Criseyde continue to appear, each one differing from the last. The Canterbury Tales, in one part or another, gives rise every month to conflicting theories. Were the pilgrims actual, living, recognizable people of Chaucer's own day? What, if there be any, is the deeper significance of the Knight's Tale? How shall we account for the puzzle of the Man of Law's Introduction, Prologue, and Tale? How seriously are we to take the irony in the Merchant's praise of marriage? Is there a dramatic point in the Wife of Bath's lecture on Gentilesse? Why is the Franklin, "Epicurus' owene soné," made the mouthpiece of such enlightened ideas? or are they really being presented as a serious solution of the problem of courtly versus married love? And what are we to make of the Clerk's performance? or the Pardoner's? None of these questions is merely idle. In one way or another, they condition our understanding of the several works in question, and ultimately affect our total attitude towards Chaucer's poetry and our critical evaluation of his worth. Shall we ascribe the puzzles to carelessness? And, if !J. S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works, 1907, p. 41. [4]

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we do, shall we call it a carelessness resulting from the conditions of occasional composition or, on the contrary, from the author's feeling that what was unlikely to be noticed was not worth troubling over? Some of these stumbling-blocks we may discount as inadvertencies that Chaucer would have mended had he come to a final revision before consigning his work to the public at large, or to posterity. Temporary indecision or change of mind might account for much that we find disturbing. Other matters we may set down as artistic flaws of which Chaucer himself was unaware, or even of which he was guilty because, considering it mainly as a pastime, he did not care deeply about the artistic integrity of his work. Perhaps he lacked high seriousness; but, if so, less and less could this charge be levelled at his critics; and the more serious they become, the less are they willing to grant that their author might be guilty of artistic frivolity. In a time like ours, when the individual artist is often exalted above the statesman, it is next to impossible to reconcile ourselves to the idea that an admittedly very great poet wrote mainly for fun. Paull Baum has called attention to the striking fact that the basic assumption of Chaucer criticism has been that the King can do no wrong, which in turn has given rise to a need among the acolytes to "maintain the dignity of the cult, and even among the genuine admirers a passion for. justifying their poet at all points at all costs."2 But the poet they try to defend is seldom the same for any two of his celebrants. The critics have seldom agreed, therefore, on the best means of shielding him from the Philistines, or even on what in Chaucer is best worth defending. Far the greater proportion of critical essays, instead of trying to find a vantagepoint that would command the work as a whole, seem to have been prompted rather by the most recent performance 2

Paull Franklin Baum, Chaucer: A Critical Appreciation, 1958, p. 58.

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on a single poem, and to have proceeded from there in any but the same direction. This fever is endemic, of course, in a competitive academic society, but it is especially catching where so much is in doubt. To be sure, we cannot go back to the day when, like Dryden or Addison, we could take up a major work and proceed to analyse it in good Aristotelian fashion—the Fable, the Characters, the Sentiments, the Language, the Faults, the Beauties; nor yet, after a discursive exhibition of Chaucer's beauties, like Warton arrive at the highly satisfying conclusion: that in elevation and elegance, in harmony and perspicuity of versification, he surpasses his predecessors in an infinite proportion: that his genius was universal, and adapted to themes of unbounded variety: that his merit was not less in painting familiar manners with humour and propriety, than in moving the passions, and in representing the beautiful or the grand objects of nature with grace and sublimity. In a word, that he appeared with all the lustre and dignity of a true poet, in an age which compelled him to struggle with a barbarous language, and a national want of taste; and when to write verses at all, was regarded as a singular qualification.3

Nor can we even emulate Warton's successor, Courthope, who, after a responsible and conscientious review, could still, so late as 1895, see Chaucer whole as "the first national poet of England," in whose pilgrimage, "in the frankness of criticism prevailing among all its members, [in] the strength of its public opinion, [in] its power of regulating its own affairs, we find, what as yet had nowhere else appeared in modern European Literature, the image of an organized nation ... a revived idea of civil society."4 No longer are we able to take so broad and confident a view of our poet at the level of critical maturity on which these pronouncements were uttered. Following, and in fact during, the indispensable collation of manuscripts and the Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, I (1774), p. 457. W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry, 1895, I, p. 300.

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consequent preparation of the great comparative annotated editions, has set in the era of fragmentary and piecemeal studies, wherein the chief movement to be discerned consists of successive waves of critical fashion, lightened by the occasional appreciations of individual masters with a strongly personal and impressionistic bias. These fashions would be an interesting field for independent investigation. The first great wave, not yet entirely spent, is of hypotheses bent on establishing historical fact. The impulse is at heart biographical, to show how the several works relate to the circumstances and outward events of Chaucer's early life. Here, for a time, the magic name of John of Gaunt was the open sesame that was applied to every lock. The exciting fact that Gaunt's mistress and third wife was probably Chaucer's sister-in-law, and that the poet and his wife were for many years pensioners of the great Duke seemed capable, expertly handled, of accounting for almost anything about the poems that raised a question or needed an explanation. But now Gaunt is discredited. Generally speaking, problems of historical relations were sufficient to occupy the whole public attention of that vanguard of Chaucerian scholars. Appreciative comment on the "beauties" belonged, it was felt, to the classroom, and one did not affront one's equals by pointing out literary qualities or values. One affected to assume that these were equally apparent to all readers, and if one had a shrewd suspicion that a nice point was a private discovery which had escaped the notice of others, it became an affair of some delicacy to convey en this matere without seeming to instruct. The point must be introduced by the way, as if recalling what might have been forgotten, or as a parenthetical observation into which one had been carried in the flush of argument: never as an independent stroke for which one might decently claim credit. Literary perception was a gift, not an achievement; learning, not taste, was the sign of mastery. To the [7]

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objection that literary criticism involved something more than knowledge of facts, it is reported that Kittredge—a truly imaginative literary scholar—stroking down his snowy beard, replied with Olympian scorn: "No doubt; but I can't write criticism—can you!" This retort, I believe, was addressed to Lowes. And to a colleague renowned as a distinguished literary essayist, Karl Young, with that sudden smile which flashed on and off like an electric light, and left you guessing, is said to have described a kindred spirit as the sort of scholar who wrote for the Atlantic Monthly] Hard upon that first wave of emphasis on facts, and scarcely distinguishable from it, followed a second in pursuit of sources. This, too, was a discipline of learning, and success in it depended on the burning of untold amounts of midnight oil in the turning-over of whole libraries of forgotten works, with a constant alertness to recognize disguised identities, and a willingness to struggle with obsolete forms of expression in unfamiliar tongues, to emerge at last, perhaps, with a negligible or even negative conclusion. In this exacting craft John Lowes was an acknowledged and influential master; and he seldom stopped short of showing the bearing of his discoveries of background on his author's artistry. His conceptions, as Tatlock noted with a hint of disparagement, are seldom open to the charge of being too bare and bald. He demonstrated that the literary study of sources and influences is properly inseparable from questions of literary value. "Put facts on their inferences," he used always to exhort his protégés. They took the lesson to heart, but they reversed the order of importance. Thus these waves ("In sequent toil all forwards do contend") in due course yielded place nearly everywhere to another, of which the chief emphasis was on the artistic significance of the individual work. The new shibboleths were —and why should I not say arel—such terms as meaning, structure, design, pattern, rhetoric, imagery, symbol, myth, [8]

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persona. Sources and influences no longer matter very much. For, it seems to be felt, if Lowes didn't uncover them, are they worth our further search? "Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!" One book now supplies the place of many: the portable library suffices the prikasour aright. He travels fast who travels light, and the modern temper sets a premium on quick arrival. We are beginning to discover that this method, too, has its disadvantages. If one book is to take the place of many, and that book is open to all, it is imperative to find there what others have not found. The current fashion thus elevates insight and originality to positions of highest supremacy in the domain of criticism. But "the eye of the intellect," Johnson long ago declared, "like that of the body, is not equally perfect in all, nor equally adapted in any to all objects." He went on to describe the abuse of two aids to mental vision in terms not wholly obsolete. Some [he wrote] seem always to read with the microscope of criticism, and employ their whole attention upon minute elegance, or faults scarcely visible to common observation. . . . Others are furnished by criticism with a telescope. They see with great clearness whatever is too remote to be discovered by the rest of mankind. . . . They discover in every passage some secret meaning, some remote allusion, some artful allegory, or some occult imitation which no other reader ever suspected; . . . but of all that engages the attention of others, they are totally insensible, while they pry into worlds of conjecture, and amuse themselves with phantoms in the clouds.

"In criticism," he concludes, "we seldom deviate far from the right, but when we deliver ourselves up to the direction of vanity."5 And to this piece of wisdom we may, for our better admonition, append words he used in another connection: "Man is seldom willing to let fall the opinion of his own dignity. . . . He is better content to want Diligence 5

The Rambler, no. 176. [9]

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than Power, and sooner confesses the Depravity of his Will than the Imbecillity of his Nature."6 It is, I think, undeniable that the greatest danger of criticism as practised today lies in the human propensity which Johnson here warns against. I doubt if its insidious temptations, in any previous epoch, were ever greater. For the whole set of the tide of our intellectual life makes it difficult, if not impossible, to be unashamedly simple. No more than material poverty is average good sense a jewel that we care to advertise. In practical life, yes; but in the life of the mind, especially where the literary professions are touched, common sense has become almost synonymous with intellectual poverty. Subtlety is equated with riches; and the hothouse climate in which we practise serious criticism accelerates its growth with terrifying speed. It is our contemporary point of honour; and the desire to excel is contagious. We would praise Chaucer, but there is no advantage in mere repetition. Taffeta phrases? silken terms precise? No: neither has today's market much use for fine writing. The learned journals do not—in fact, must not—accept for publication what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. That is not any longer an acceptable definition of true wit, and it is no accident that the metaphysical poets have been reinstated in our time. We seem almost to be driven, by inner and outer circumstance, into the cul-de-sac of critical perversity. Subtlety inevitably breeds its own excess. But is it so certain that critical disciplines nourished on the metaphysicals provide the best approach to a poet who deliberately practised a style capable of being instantly followed by a moderately attentive ear, and who seems to have had a genuine liking for russet yeas and honest kersey noes? We may reasonably doubt it. It behooves us, therefore, to clarify our thoughts as to the sort of questions we *The Idler, no. 88. [10]

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may legitimately ask of Chaucer's work, the sort of demands we have a right to make upon it, and the sort of techniques we may fittingly apply. It may be that he is the wrong subject for the kind of investigation many of us today are most interested in pursuing in literary studies. We may discover that earlier students were following trails more rewarding in the long run than those we have latterly been exploring. No one will deny that we need solider foundations of fact, about the times and the man. To set our literary judgments and conclusions upon hypotheses that in turn balance precariously upon conditions is not a procedure that guarantees endurance. As thus: // the Troilus was misunderstood and denounced by highly placed ladies as a betrayal of the chivalric and courtly ideal of womanhood; and // Chaucer was commanded to compose The Legend of Good Women as a penance for his offence: then he may have gone about it in a spirit of mischief; and then we are to take the term good ironically and read the whole work as a mocking parody of the saints' legends. // some of the Canterbury pilgrims exemplify the offences they castigate, then Chaucer may have planned a systematic panorama of the deadly sins, culminating in the Parson's Tale; and therefore we should look at the role of each pilgrim in the light of its contribution to the treatise as a whole, and judge it accordingly. // Chaucer planned a symposium among his pilgrims on the subject of the marriage relation, then he would have arranged the contributions to it in a significant climactic order (// the MSS establish one authoritatively); and then we are to regard the Franklin's Tale as the poet's idealistic solution of the implicit question. We need more historical knowledge. We need more light on the meaning, the recognition of historical truth among the people of Chaucer's day; and on how they estimated the weight of authority. We need more evidence, of course, on Chaucer's literary chronology; and better acquaintance with

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the conditions of authorship in his time, and with the religious, political, and social conditions under the influence of which he wrote. How much critical comment did he get from his contemporaries? How much liberty did he have for prolonged and concentrated effort in composition? We wish for more light on the principles of literature and of art in his day. Was he as careless as some have thought him about the coherence and unity of his compositions, or is it that we are out of touch with his world? And when we discover unity in the dream-visions, for example, is it because we are determined to find what Chaucer himself might be indifferent towards? What sort of verisimilitude was important to him? What kinds of allegorical meaning (in works such as the Parliament; the Man of Law's Tale; the Nun's Priest's Tale; The House of Fame) are we entitled to suspect or to look for? Religious? Political? Philosophical? What are the limits, within the totality of his conscious artistic effort, of his irony? Many such questions may never be answered satisfactorily; and many will remain subject to difference of opinion. But further historical investigation must go hand in hand with the analysis and controlled reading of his work. Together, these offer legitimate challenge. Certainly the problems are central and they are abundant. We cannot calculate, we can only guess, the extent of our unconscious displacement from Chaucer's vision of the greatest objects of contemplation. Take, as open questions: the supernatural, and its immanence in earthly affairs; the heavenly bodies, and their influences on human life; the idea of external nature and its closeness to the divine; human nature, and the operations of the mind of man. Astrologians, writes Chaucer in his Astrolabe, say that the ascendent and eke the lord of the ascendent may be shapen for to be fortunat or infortunat, as thus:—A "fortunat ascendent" clepen they whan that no wicked planète, as Saturn or Mars or elles

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the Tayl of the Dragoun, is in the hous of the ascendent, ne that no wicked planète have noon aspect of enemyte upon the ascendent. . . . The lord of the ascendent, sey thei that he is fortunat when he is in god place fro the ascendent, as in an angle, or in a succident where as he is in hys dignité and comfortid with frendly aspectes of planètes and wel resceyved; and eke that he may seen the ascendent; and that he be not retrograd, ne combust, ne joyned with no shrewe in the same signe. . . .

This information is given for the benefit of his ten-year-old pupil, even though he expresses reservations on its reliability : these ben observances of judicial matere and rytes of payens, in whiche my spirit hath no feith ne knowing of her horoscopum. (Part II, Section 4) 7

At the same time, while these refinements may be debatable, he states without question of the signs of the zodiac that whan the sonne entrith into eny of the signes he takith the propirte of suche bestes . . . or elles whan the planètes ben under thilke signes thei causen us by her influence, operaciouns and effectes like to the operaciouns of bestes. . . . And everich of these 12 signes hath respect to a certeyn parcel of the body of a man, and hath it in governaunce; as Aries hath thin heved, and Taurus thy nekke and thy throte, Gemini thin armholes and thin armes, and so furth. . . . (Part I, Section 21)

We know that Chaucer's Doctor in The Canterbury Tales proceeded on these principles, For he was grounded in astronomye. He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel In houres by his magyk natureel. Wel koude he fortunen the ascendent Of his ymages for his pacient. (I, 414-418)

Yet, we are told, "His studie was but litel on the Bible." Did that make him a worse physician or was it just a fact? Would Chaucer have summoned him to his bedside, or did he distrust his knowledge and his skill? Much is made of planetary influences in the Troilus. We recall that it was the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter and 7 A11 quotations from Chaucer's works refer to F. N. Robinson, éd., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1933.

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Luna in Cancer that caused the downpour which kept Criseyde at Pandarus' house on the fatal night. Elsewhere, Chaucer declares, And also blisful Venus, wel arrayed, Sat in hire seventhe hous of hevene tho, Disposed wel, and with aspectes payed, To helpe sely Troilus of his woo. And, soth to seyne, she nas not al a foo To Troilus in his nativitee; God woot that wel the sonner spedde he. (II, 680-686)

Supposing—as might have been the fact—that Chaucer had been in Pandarus' situation, and that a contemporary pair of lovers had been his friends, would he have regarded these so-called "influences of the hevenes hye" as significant, or as negligible? How much weight do they add for him to the overhanging sense of destiny in the tragedy? We must observe, if we are inclined to discount these claims as literary rigmarole, that not only does the narrator in his poems make them, but most of his characters as well are ready to appeal in any crisis to the same powers for assistance, or to lay their misfortunes to the same account. Troilus, of course, is full of illustrations. But no long search is needed for others. When Arcite hears Palamon cry out, in the prison which they share, he tries to comfort him thus: Fortune hath yeven us this adversitee. Som wikke aspect or disposicioun Of Saturne, by som constellacioun, Hath yeven us this, although we hadde it sworn; So stood the hevene whan that we were born. (I. 1086-1090)

When Constance is about to be dispatched from Rome to wed the Mohammedan Sultan in Syria, the Man of Law exclaims: O firste moevyng! crueel firmament, With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay And hurlest al from est til occident That naturelly wolde holde another way,

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Thy crowdyng set the hevene in swich array At the bigynnyng of this fiers viage, That crueel Mars hath slayn this mariage. Infortunat ascendent tortuous, Of which the lord is helplees falle, allas, Out of his angle into the derkeste hous! O Mars, o atazir, as in this cas! O fieble moone, unhappy been thy paas! Thou knyttest thee ther thou art nat receyved; Ther thou were weel, fro thennes artow weyved. Imprudent Emperour of Rome, alias! Was ther no philosophre in al thy toun? Is no tyme bet than oother in swich cas? Of viage is ther noon elecciounl Namely to folk of heigh condicioun? Noght whan a roote is of a burthe yknowe? Alias, we been to lewed or to slowe! (II, 295-315)

Without entering into the debate among recent astrologians such as Professors Curry and Manly about the precise significance of this passage, we may take note of the fact that it was not in the Anglo-Norman source but was introduced by Chaucer for purposes of his own. It is unreasonable not to infer that the poet was interested in these subjects; that he could count on the interest of his audience in them; and that he and his audience, perhaps in varying degree, shared the common belief in their validity. Such allusions are there not with the idea of raising mirth, or for a mere poetical flourish; not to diminish the action of the characters in esteem but to give greater dignity and a sense of cosmic perspective to their conduct. This they could not do unless they were still potent. We must remember that most aspects of life were linked in diverse ways to these ideas: the order and stability of the universe, the elements and their correspondent properties, the ideological structure of the natural kingdom, and of humorous, microcosmic man. It was no simple matter of entire acceptance or entire repudiation. Faith loosens into superstition and crumbles into disbelief with a complexity subtler than the unimaginable touch of

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time. People still find virtue in birthstones, and provincial newspapers carry daily astrological prognostications. The evidence, at any rate, seems to show that Chaucer and his contemporaries more frequently raised their eyes to the heavens than lowered them to the earth. The continual references in his work to the movements and positions of the heavenly bodies far outweigh his allusions to the natural scene as of significance to men's lives. A tree, a mountain, flowers—excepting symbolic daisies!—beasts and birds— unless they could talk!—had slight influence on man's conduct, his moral life, his spirit, otherwise than in generally increasing his seasonal enjoyment of living. Not for nothing, in his noble ballade on Truth, does Chaucer enjoin his friend, Know thy contrée, look up! ... Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede.

His references, too, to natural objects are incidental and conveyed in simile or parenthesis, for the most part. They vivify our sense of appearances, or they serve to localize action, but they are seldom introduced for their own sake. When Arcite and Palamon engage each other in mortal combat, Thou myghtest wene that this Palamon In his fightyng were a wood león, And as a crueel tigre was Arcite; As wilde bores gonne they to smyte, That frothen whit as foom for ire wood.

(1,1655-1659)

Again, the description of Alison in the Miller's Tale is full of natural comparisons: "as any wezele hir body gent and smal"; her brows "were bent and blake as any sloo"; She was ful moore blisful on to see Than is the newe pere-jonette tree, And softer than the wolle is of a wether;

her song "was as loude and yerne/As any swalwe sittynge on a berne"; she could skip like any kid or calf following the mother; [16]

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Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth, Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth;

she was as skittish as a pretty colt (I, 3233-3262). Incidentally, again, sometimes a single natural detail will evoke a scene with marvellous effectiveness, as when Criseyde lies in bed savouring the first revelation that Prince Troilus is in love with her, and wondering how she shall respond: A nyghtyngale, upon a cedir grene, Under the chambre wal ther as she ley, Fui loude song ayein the moone shene, Peraunter, in his briddes wise, a lay Of love, that made hire herte fressh and gay. (II, 918-922)

With equal simplicity the poet suggests nightfall in two evocative lines of which the very absence of specific image constitutes the magic: And white thynges wexen dymme and donne For lak of lyght, and sierres for t'apere. (II, 908-909)

In a poet with so keen an eye for the concretely telling detail, the avoidance in such passages of particular natural description is surprising. But I think it is also characteristic. The scenes that he gives us are suggestive, not usually specific: they are composed of generalized elements—of details, but of classes, without individualization; rather identified than described. A memorable example, untypical in its fullness, occurs in the Knight's Tale: The bisy larke, messager of day, Salueth in hir song the morwe gray, And firy Phebus riseth up so bright That al the orient laugheth of the light, And with his stremes dryeth in the grèves The silver dropes hangynge on the leves. (I, 1491-1496)

This is sheer legerdemain. We do not so much see, as experience, a country sunrise. The lark is not there to be seen, [17]

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but only heard; the drying of the dews of night is not to be witnessed, but only its effects. The gray dawn disappears with the arrival of the fiery sun: truth is beauty, and we are completely satisfied. Arcite rises to enjoy the merry May morning, but he has missed the miracle of its coming. Quite as surprising and miraculous are the eighteen lines that open The Canterbury Tales. So far as concerns the description of nature in pictorial detail, these lines are absolutely featureless: there is not a single visual image. Yet a profound realization of the stir and meaning of Spring's re-birth—of April to the end of time—has been implanted in our consciousness before the paragraph concludes. But when a detail of visible Spring flowers is later introduced, they are on the person of the Squire, in the embroidery of his gay clothing. To us, nursed on the poetry of the last two centuries, on the small celandine, the primrose by the river's brim, the single flower in the crannied wall, this is a phenomenon well worthy of remark. The more so in that there is to be found in the lines quoted little or nothing of that conceptual abstraction characteristic of the eighteenth century, the merits of which also we are beginning to rediscover. Zephirus, to be sure, and perhaps nature ("so priketh hem nature in hir corages") are personifications, of a factual kind. Yet there is no scene. It is all generalized; and we return to the assertion that, in spite of his vividness and lack of abstraction, Chaucer seldom tries to describe an actual landscape or natural scene, or even to give us enough detail to enable us to compose one with any distinctness. It does not seem important to him to do so. What interests him on the surface of this earth is primarily man, not his physical environment. All the important exceptions, all the more considerable landscape paintings, to be found in his work, occur in the dream-visions, and there is a significant reason, I believe, for this fact. It is that the dream scenery is not a picture of

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earthly nature but of idealized nature, a paradise not subject to chance or change, to decay or death. Th'air of that place so attempre was That ne veré was ther grevaunce of hot ne cold; There wex ek every holsom spice and gras; No man may there waxe sek ne old; Yit was there joye more a thousandfold Than man can telle; ne nevere wolde it nyghte, But ay cler day to any manes syghte. (Parliament of Fowls, 204-210)

It is a nature beyond time, and it is worth extended description just because it is unreal and unearthly in that sense. For the last two centuries, at least, thoughts of the natural world have been involved, in greater or less degree, with the idea of divinity, of the imperishable and the sublime; of an immanent deity; Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air.

It is impossible for us to detach ourselves completely from these feelings and associations, no matter what the complexion of our religious beliefs. But, on the contrary, Chaucer was probably never much tempted to attach such sentiments to the visual scene. Although the "noble goddesse Nature" is most beautiful, and, as "the vicaire of the almighty Lord," acknowledged of all living creatures as in immediate command, she is rather familiar than awe-inspiring as Chaucer presents her—even in the Parliament, especially designed to exalt her idea, while she administers the "lawe of Kynde." Things beneath the moon, apart from the soul of man, were of the earth, earthly, subject to time and fortune; things above the moon were timeless and eternal. And therefore—in the sense of my context—Chaucer was disposed to look up to the heavens and not down to earth. It is significant, I believe, that where he does make [19]

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use in his poetry of natural scenes, he almost always emphasizes the most ethereal aspect of them, the least embodied, so to say: the qualities of light and shadow and colour, which borrow their attributes from above: Bright was the day, and blew the firmament; Phebus hath of gold his stremes doun ysent To gladen every flour with his warmnesse. . . . (Canterbury Tales, IV, 2218-2220)

To turn, now, to another doubtful question of attitude: his feeling for language and style. We have learned that Chaucer was a student of mediaeval poetic theory, and we notice in his poetry that from time to time he takes an ostentatious, if wayward and light-hearted, pleasure in displaying his mastery of this knowledge. How are we to respond to lines like these (from the Troilus), exemplifying the rhetorical device of interpretation The dayes honour, and the hevenes yë, The nyghtes foo—al this clepe I the sonne— Gan westren faste (II, 904-906)

They begin a stanza of which the end was quoted earlier for its evocative magic. Does Chaucer expect us to smile or admire? If to smile, how can he hope that his audience will re-attune to serious beauties three lines later? If to admire, how can he move straightway into the tender simplicity of what follows without minding the difference himself? Since the context as a whole is for delicate loveliness one of the supreme passages of his masterpiece—the scene in Criseyde's garden, when Antigone, "the shene," sings her Trojan song of happy love, and the ensuing talk between the ladies falls into the freshly turned soil of Criseyde's mind like the gentle rain from heaven—how can we take the rhetorical flourish as other than humorous, though discomposing? But then why does he for a momentary toy ruffle the mood of our acceptance? Passing comment in other [20]

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parts of Chaucer's work—notably in the Clerk's and Franklin's Prologues, and the Squire's and Nun's Priest's Tales— convinces us that he is alive to the impertinence of such "colours." No one doubts today that Chaucer is one of the half-dozen greatest poets who have written in English, and many would be willing to lower the figure. (Manly puts him second.) A poet does not reach that rank without a high degree of selfawareness in the practice of his art. This is why we are so eager to find him out and penetrate his innermost mind. But it cannot be denied that he is baffling in many ways. One of these is an apparent readiness to endanger a triumphant achievement by what seems to us ill-timed and merely idle facetiousness—as if Laurence Sterne had suddenly seized the pen. An example has already been given; one or two more may be added. Not to enter the deeper levels of debate about the significance of the kaleidoscopic conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde, we may select a single item for illustration. Our hearts have been wrung almost literally beyond endurance by Chaucer's utter command of our emotional sympathies with Troilus' suffering. His pangs are ours. Few lines in all literature are so affecting when we meet them in their place as his final earthly farewell to the idea of his faithless love: ... I se that clene out of youre mynde Ye han me cast; and I ne kan nor may, For al this world, withinne myn herte fynde To unloven yow a quarter of a day! In corsed tyme I born was, weilaway, That yow, that doon me al this wo endure, Yet love I best of any creature!.. . But trewely, Criseyde, swete may, Whom I have ay with al my myght yserved, That ye thus doon, I have it nat deserved. (V, 1695-1722)

Sixty lines later, and before Chaucer has despatched his hero by the hand of the fierce Achilles, he pauses to address the

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ladies in his audience. He beseeches them not to blame him for what happened, observes that women have been betrayed as well as men, and continues: And this commeveth me To speke, and in effect yow allé I preye, Beth war of men, and herkneth what I seye! (V, 1783-1785)

The couplet might have been lifted straight out of the Legend of Phillis, where it is virtually repeated, and where it is clearly frivolous. I do not speak of other paradoxes in the Epilogue, and I for one will cling as long as possible to the working assumption that as a great artist Chaucer knows best. But I would ask: can we honestly assure ourselves that we understand Chaucer's mind and art if we lack adequate understanding of his procedure in crucial and climactic moments of his best work? We are not merely disturbed, we are sometimes disoriented and amazed by the rapid shifts of stylistic level, the apparent sacrifice of achieved effects, the reversals of mood and tone, the abrupt stoppage of narrative momentum, the commingling of colloquial and artificial diction, the breathtaking incorporation of the whole range of language into the working texture of the verse. Most readers would readily admit the Knight's Tale among the company of Chaucer's best. The following passage in it, necessarily long, will provide illustrations of all these perplexing features of his style. It comes at the main climax of the narrative, just after the tournament. Ther was namoore but "Fare wel, have good day!" Of this bataille I wol namoore endite, But speke of Palamon and of Arcite. Swelleth the brest of Arcite, and the soore Encreesseth at his herte moore and moore. The clothered blood, for any lechecraft, Corrupteth, and is in his bouk ylaft, That neither veyne-blood, ne ventusynge, [22]

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Ne drynke of herbes may ben his helpynge. The vertu expulsif, or animal, Fro thilke vertu cleped natural Ne may the venym voyden ne expelle. The pipes of his longes gonne to swelle, And every lacerte in his brest adoun Is shent with venym and corrupcioun. Hym gayneth neither, for to gete his lif, Vomyt upward, ne dounward laxatif. Al is tobrosten thilke regioun; Nature hath now no dominacioun. And certeinly, ther Nature wol nat wirche, Fare wel phisik! go ber the man to chirche! This al and som, that Arcita moot dye; For which he sendeth after Emelye, And Palamon, that was his cosyn deere. Thanne seyde he thus, as ye shal after heere: "Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte Declare o point of allé my sorwes smerte To yow, my lady, that I love moost; But I biquethe the servyce of my goost To yow aboven every creature, Syn that my lyf may no lenger dure. Allas, the wof alias, the peynes stronge, That I for yow have suffred, and so longe! Allas, the deeth! alias, myn Emelye! Alias, departynge of oure compaignye! Alias, myn hertes queene! alias, my wyf ! Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf! What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Alione, withouten any compaignye. Fare wel, my sweete foo, myn Emelye!..." And with that word his speche faille gan, For from his feet up to his brest was come The coold of deeth, that hadde hym overcome. ... Dusked his eyen two, and failled breeth. ... His spirit chaunged hous and wente ther, As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher. Therfore I stynte, I nam no divinistre; Of soûles fynde I nat in this registre, Ne me ne list thilke opinions to telle Of hem, though that they writen wher they dwelle. Arcite is coold, ther Mars his soule gye! Now wol I speken forth of Emelye. (I, 2740-2816)

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The term kaleidoscopic seems to be justified here for the oscillations of narrative, the shifts of rhetorical level, the alterations of mood, and the swing of diction from professional to colloquial, to the impassioned but simple language of grief. Could Chaucer, we inquire, expect his audience to adapt themselves so flexibly to these contradictory motions without remaining so detached as to be virtually indifferent to the human values of the tale? And what of himself? Was he telling us that the human values didn't matter? Is that the meaning of: What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Alione, withouten any compaignye?

Turning, now, to his people. The range and—as it often seems—reckless juxtaposition of persons in Chaucer's poetry constitutes a further challenge to readers conditioned by the naturalistic approaches of modern fiction and drama. He acknowledges no allegiance to the laws that now regulate these kingdoms, and whether or not he legislates as sovereign, it is obvious that he moves freely where we are bound. To go with him is like travelling—as I imagine—with some Eastern potentate in his own dominions: one needs time to adjust to the quiet audacity of his conduct combined with the disarming modesty of his manner. We could, if we wished, assign the persons of literary art to places on a graduated scale, between the extremes of the personified abstraction at one end and the literally naturalistic representation of a historical identity at the other. Between these extremes are many shades of difference, and of the choices made the representation may be only suggestive, not fully rounded or full-length. To try to place Chaucer's characters on such a gamut is to realize that he assumed rights of possession over, and employed, an extraordinary range of possibilities, in comparison to which [24]

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modern authors are confined as it were to a single octave. Without hesitation, Chaucer introduces into his poems: his living contemporaries, as Scogan, Bukton, Adam; recent historical personages, Peter, King of Castile, Pierre de Lusignan, Bernabô Visconti; his contemporaries conventionally, or realistically, portrayed, as Blaunche, or Gaunt, or the pilgrims; his contemporaries allegorized, as the fowls of the Parliament or the flower-like Marguerite; personifications of human types familiar to him and to us, as January and May; persons from ancient history, as Lucrèce, Cleopatra, Zenobia; persons from Holy Writ, saints' legend, fable, and myth; fictive characters realistically embodied, such as those in the tales of the Miller and Reeve; fictive characters psychologically projected, such as Pandarus and Criseyde; borderline persons, half sense half symbol, such as Griselda and Custance; fantastic simulacra, such as those in the House of Rumour; otherworld characters who intermingle with human beings, such as Pluto and Proserpina; personified creatures, such as the Golden Eagle, Chauntecler, and Pertelote; personified inanimate objects, such as his empty purse—"for you are my dear lady, my queen of comfort, and sorry am I to find you light"; personified abstractions, such as Fortune, Fame, or the God of Love. The list could be extended. He thus illustrates in the course of his writing the naturalistic, the parabolic, the allegoric, the fantastic, the symbolic. And, of course, he does not always adhere consistently to a single way of presenting the same figure. It will be part of our business to try to discover what, if any, inhibitions he may be sensible of, and whether he observes some code of inner decorum or propriety in these appearances, to facilitate our acceptance of them in a particular context. One figure is omnipresent in all his work, and that is himself as objectified in his various narrative writings. It is a current fashion, not to say a fad, to discuss the persona in [25]

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works of fiction, and of late there has been a rash of talk about Chaucer's persona, meaning the "I" in his poetry. I have little hesitation in saying that nine-tenths of this talk is misguided and palpably mistaken. It is wrong because it was conceived in and of a world of printed books, and bases its premisses and assumptions on conditions which could not obtain in any other. Lip service is paid from time to time to the knowledge that Chaucer wrote for oral delivery, but this primary fact is continually lost sight of or ignored by those who write on the persona, and its implications are seldom fully realized. The world of print makes possible things never dreamed of in Chaucer's philosophy and we must not impute to him a state of mind that would only develop in later eras. Gulliver has been cited as an approximate counterpart of the pilgrim who appears as Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. But Gulliver should instead be invoked to point the difference between Swift's literary world and Chaucer's. Swift's conscious aim is mystification and deception. Gulliver is indeed the persona of the author. His existence and character as a man of truth are vouched for by his old friend and publisher, Sympson, and he describes his beginnings very specifically in his first paragraph: "My Father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old," and so on. A solid, objective identity, traceable through a particular life-history, whom we come to know as we read his account of his experiences and his reflections on them. Only thus, as he projects himself on the printed page, can we know him. Gradually, as we read his words, we are led to set a very different interpretation on those experiences from that which his explicit statements represent as his own, and we begin to identify our views with those of his creator, who remains concealed and hypothetical. Such concealment is essential to Swift's technique and success: without it as [26]

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a base, it could not have occurred to him to write such a book. And without printing, he could hardly have accomplished it. But now suppose that Swift had invited a company of friends and acquaintances to a reading by himself from the only existing copy, and commenced: "You all know me, Jonathan Swift, and I don't need to tell you where I was born, or who my father was, or where I was educated. I am going to skip the preliminaries and give you an account of a journey 1 took not long ago from London to Canterbury, starting about the middle of April, and of what befell on the way. But first I'll tell you about the people who collected by chance the day before at the inn where I stopped, the Tabard in Southwark, a convenient point of departure." If Swift kept to normal expectations in his narrative, describing likely people, familiar places, and probable events on the road, and mentioning his own role and his reactions by the way, would any one have reason to deduce that the man in the narrative, of whom he spoke as himself, whom his companions referred to as Swift, was to be understood as a person quite distinct from the man in front of them? Surely not. But, being known to be a shrewd observer, witty, and also weighty in counsel on men and affairs, suppose he allowed himself "dead-pan" observations which, taken at face value, would be silly, but which were intermixed with the subtlest perceptions; or perhaps praise of rascals, juxtaposed with discriminating appreciation of fineness in persons of integrity: should his audience then infer that Swift had invented another character who travelled in his name, or merely that he was having some mischievous fun, for his own and their entertainment; and be alert as to which way he might jump next? And if, whenever he referred directly to himself, he gave his references a wryly comic slant, would it then be necessary to conclude that he had set up a Gulliver his listeners were expected to round out as an unrelated [27]

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figure, or simply that it was more amusing to represent himself in a distorted mirror than in a straight image? I labour the obvious truth that, in view of the conditions confronting Chaucer as poet, what he did not specify as an exceptional requirement his audiences would neither assume nor imagine; and that when he wanted them to attribute words and sentiments to another character, he always made that clear. The schizoid notion of two Chaucers, so named, presented simultaneously, one a puppet, the other the living, speaking poet, with attitudes and intelligences radically different from each other's, could only have arisen in a time when authors would habitually think of themselves as completely separable from their books, and from their audiences, so that when they chose they could make the first personal pronoun stand for anyone they pleased. This was not the practice of the epic narrator, as Lüdeke has demonstrated abundantly in his book on the subject—an honourable exception to the usual extravagance. I am afraid that Kittredge gave the misconception a powerful impulse in his persuasive Johns Hopkins lecture on The Book of the Duchess, in 1914. Discussing the Dreamer (the "I") in that poem, he declared: "he is a purely imaginary figure, to whom certain purely imaginary things happen, in a purely imaginary dream. He is as much a part of the fiction in the Book of the Duchess as the Merchant or the Pardoner or the Host is a part of the fiction in the Canterbury Tales." Kittredge proceeded to sketch the character of this dreamer, who as he viewed him is a childlike simpleton "who never reasons, but only feels and gets impressions, who never knows what anything means until he is told in the plainest language, [who] is not Geoffrey Chaucer, the humorist and man of the world . . . [but a] dramatic character."8 The portrait as Kittredge painted it is still being discussed; but so promising a lead 8

G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 1915, pp. 48, 50.

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has been carried far beyond the point where Kittredge dropped it. In our own decade, we have been instructed that the speaker in the General Prologue is only a reporter, usually quite unaware of the meaning of what he sees, a bourgeois spirit powerfully impressed by appearances and more than ready to accept the values, as he loves the splendours, of high society; snobbish and dim-witted. He it is who tells the Rime of Sir Thopas, because it is the best he knows, and not in the least funny; and he is not that Chaucer to whom the Man of Law refers, who writes poetry. He sees things distinctly but without discrimination, and is quite taken in by the Monk and the Summoner. Yet we are to be always on the qui vive to drop him instantly for the other, physically present, Chaucer, who interposes at unspecified moments with a higher degree of human wisdom. Presumably, the latter is the Chaucer who reports with appreciation the ironic subtleties or delicacies of the other pilgrims. The other narrative poems, also, have been studied from the same point of view, and the narrator in each has been analysed as a separable fiction. The Chaucer of The House of Fame is a man to whom books are a quite sufficient surrogate for experience and who does not wish to exchange his comfortable security for a more active existence. The dreamer in the Parliament is a character hungry for love, tortured, in fact, with longings aroused, but unsatisfied, by his reading. And a solution has been found for the troublesome conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde by the same means. The whole poem is told by a fictional narrator, and Chaucer enters in his own person only at the end, correcting the wrong ideas gradually imbibed by us from the overemphatic teller of the tale and setting ultimate values, at the last possible moment, to rights. Is it not advisable to return to a less sophisticated way of looking at the subject? Nobody supposes that when a man

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talks about himself in a social environment, in a company met to enjoy one another, he need treat what he says as a deposition in a court of law. If he is humorous, wise, and witty, he will be self-conscious in varying degree; and he will try to be modest and unassuming, entertaining, and probably ironic in the way he expresses himself. If he has some conspicuous mole of nature which might expose him to the eye of malice or to mischievous amusement, he will learn how to turn it to his advantage by anticipation. Lamb's stutter was delightful; and many a fat man profits by goodnatured acknowledgment of the fact. If he is given to irony, he will add spice to his discourse. Everyone knows how much the pleasure of conversation is enhanced by such continuous play of mind; and self-mockery, or the refusal to take oneself too seriously, is an essential ingredient in personal allusions if they are not to become offensive. It misleads no one: the audience neither takes the speaker at his literal word nor jumps to the conclusion that the discrepancy between what it hears and what it sees and knows signifies that someone else is being talked about. The remarks, indeed, gain their effect by virtue of the fact that all the while a tacit comparison with another image is proceeding. This silent process is the very core of irony. At this ironic game Chaucer was a master, and it is a pervasive and constant element in the social tone of his poetry. To deprive him of it at a stroke, by assuming that he wishes us to look, not at him, but at a substitute existing as an independent fiction in a cast of characters, is to deprive him and us at the same time of the source of our keenest enjoyment. In perhaps no other poetry ever written has an author established between himself and his audience a bond so immediate, so personal, so amusing, so teasingly full of nuance, so deceptively transparent, so delicately elusive— in a word, so highly civilized. The first-personal technique as Chaucer developed it must have traced a course somewhat like this. He begins with [30]

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short lyrical forms, where the question of audience relations would have made itself felt not primarily within the song but in the author's platform presence. Going on to narrative, he would be led to comment and to the expression, overt or implicit, of his own attitudes on the action and character of persons in the tales. As narrator, he would thus be establishing a closer relation with his audience, and would naturally feel restricted in certain ways: he could not challenge or outrage the prevailing sentiment of the company but would try to engage their sympathies with his own. This would be a kind of persuasive address, the poet being the adroit master of ceremonies presenting events. His attitude would be disclosed pari passu with the action narrated, and would not have to be clearly defined nor consistent, if it but carried his listeners with him. There would thus be no need for him to be conceived as another than himself, whether he chose to make his subject-matter autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical, or whether he chose to remain outside the action as merely its reporter. When, by assigning his tale to a fictitious character, he lifted this procedure bodily and placed it in a dramatic frame, the basic technique would remain the same, but a new set of psychological relationships would emerge to view, and these would require some superficial adjustments. The latent capability of pieces written without thought of a dramatic frame would partly depend on how neutrally or unindividually the narrator had told his tales. The problem of technical innovations would not arise until the assigned character became so dominant as to impose his own attitudes on the matter and interpretation of his tale. We may reasonably surmise that if Chaucer had been long practised in the habit of assuming a distinct dramatic identity in each of his narrative poems, and of speaking from behind that mask, he would have explored and extended this technique without delay as soon as he had devised the Canterbury frame, and we should have had a series of genuine dramatic monologues upon

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which the personality of each pilgrim was indelibly marked. But rather, Chaucer usually continues to write as he had previously written, from a point of view natural to himself, and little solicitous of individual dramatic nuance. For example, the poet's mind was not on the Shipman's when the Shipman commenced his tale with the words: A marchant whilom dwelled at Seint Denys, That riche was, for which men helde hym wys.

Nor, to be over-scrupulous, was it on the Wife of Bath or on the Summoner, who also have been connected with Chaucer's intentions for this tale. Instead, his mind was on his own audience and on his relation to it. In the wide gamut of represented beings in Chaucer's works, persons or figures from very different levels of reality not infrequently meet in startling juxtaposition. Dreams, of course, enclose a territory where normal expectancy admits of such encounters. There, Chaucer, airborne, is able to profit by a quiet discourse on the motion of sound-waves, from the mouth of a supernatural bird. Goddesses, birds, Scipio, and Chaucer come into the same garden for talk and "solace." The God of Love tries Chaucer in a rural setting filled with classical ladies. But elsewhere, too, such contrasts and clashes occur. The devil and man meet face to face; in Homeric fashion Pluto and Proserpina intervene in human affairs, and Phoebus keeps house with a human wife; a "lusty bachelor" marries an otherworld being; a poor old widow, of great sobriety of life, harbours the King of Cocks. Flemish tavern-haunters set out to slay the person of Death. It is evident that this poet has few compunctions about transgressing the laws of natural probability. But there may be other laws in the world of imagination that he inhabits, and we may try to discover and examine some of these higher proprieties. It will be convenient, in our search for them, to make broad distinctions between three main levels, or states of [32]

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awareness, or spheres of interest which intersect with one another in Chaucer's poetic practice. One of these is the dream-world; another is the area of mundane existence and waking observation; and the third is the world of imagined life through reading. In each of these conditions of awareness, Chaucer, as we know, was vitally engaged. He was a keen student of man, an avid reader, and insatiably curious about the nature of dreams. He was fascinated by the differences between states of consciousness experienced by a single individual in a brief course of time: by the subjective colouring of event from hour to hour; by the contribution of vicarious life through written record; by the riddle of consciousness during sleep. What kind of truth resided in each, and how might they serve to correct one another? And what literary values might be extracted from them? They raised perennial problems of appearance and reality. These were ever presenting themselves to Chaucer's mind and his poetry was the residual precipitation of this fundamental concern. The genre of the dream-vision, usually involving the three modes of awareness in close juxtaposition, gave him welcome opportunities for their exploration and poetic representation. But, in a sense, too, the Canterbury pilgrimage, itself alternating between the world of "fact" and the world of "fiction," is a continuation, on a vaster scale, of the same inquiry. We shall wish to learn something about the special nature and prerogatives of each sphere in Chaucer, and something about their interconnections, and how the figures proper to one pass into another. We shall, of course, be especially curious about the cases where our own sense of propriety is offended—where the poet seems to be violating rules that we feel he ought to observe. These should be diagnostic in our analysis of his art. With these questions in mind, a brief exploratory visit to each sphere in turn may help us to clarify and to vivify our sense of Chaucer's poetic achievement. [33]

2. IN AND OUT OF DREAMS WHAT, WE ARE NOW TO ASK, did Chaucer make of that world of perpetual wonder and miracle into which every one of us passes, not once or twice in a lifetime, but for some hours of every twenty-four: the world of dreams? What for him is its credit? What are its properties and proprieties? And how may its reservoirs be drawn upon for the needs of literature? As to credit, Chaucer perhaps never made up his mind. That dreams can be prophetic he is not prepared to deny. That they may have physiological causes he is quite ready to grant. That they may sometimes be a figurative commentary or obscure interpretation of events he can well conceive. Certainly, that they may contain divine revelations he must, as a good Christian, implicitly believe, though assurance in particular cases is nowadays most difficult to attain. He appears to have read widely on the whole subject, and to have acquired a very respectable familiarity with the theory and content of mediaeval dream-lore. The Boethian vision, Macrobius on Cicero, and the vaster scheme of Dante were formative influences on his thought, and the impress of The Romance of the Rose on his poetry was lifelong. [34]

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In practice, however, he uses dreams always dramatically, making them fit his context; or leaving the basic questions open, with a frank confession of his inability to decide. In The House of Fame he professes himself put to a stand by the whole problem. But, in the Nun's Priest's Tale, Pertelote v/ill give a positive physiological reading, while Chauntecler will be equally certain that he is being forewarned. Criseyde, falling in love, dreams prophetically of an exchange of hearts with her eagle; Trouus, in jealous apprehension, dreams with equal truth of his lady kissing the tusked boar that Cassandra identifies as Diomed. Pandarus, whatever his deeper sentiments, professes utter scepticism: "A straw for allé swevenes signifiaunce!" he cries. If, on the level of experience, we ask about the properties of the dream-world, the answer comes without delay. If there are restrictions in the sum total of possibilities—the characters, the kinds and combinations of beings—their regulation in dream has not yet been determined. No laws of mere propriety are known to operate in that world. But such considerations can and do enter at the level of literary representation, not only in the forms and combinations within sleep's own domain but also in the relations with the adjacent territories of books and daily life. Scipio can pass, with little outward discomfiture but with a startling inner change, from book to dream; the Daisy, supplanting the familiar helpful guide (animal or human) of other dreams, becomes metamorphosed into the Queen Alceste. Dreams in Chaucer's poetry are found to be artistic constructions that appeal for their validity to literary and aesthetic considerations. Except for the suddenness of its opening transitions, the dream in The Book of the Duchess has a sufficiently close consonancy with waking experience. So also have the more significant parts of the other visions. The abnormal figures and features are at least partially referred and adjusted to the waking consciousness and to literary decorum. Hence, Chaucer's dreams give rise to rational speculation [35]

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and ask to be judged primarily by the familiar criteria of cause and effect. When we study Chaucer's dream-visions, we are struck by his characteristic use of reading as a device to launch his poems. This has frequently been mentioned as a stock convention of the genre, but I believe it to be much more integral, more dynamic, and more individually employed in Chaucer's dream-poems than in those of earlier poets. The French poems from which Chaucer levies tribute do not present the dreamer as a reader. To Chaucer, reading seems to be a natural gateway from the active life to the contemplative, from waking to dreaming; and probably he thought of himself as unusual in this regard. Relatively few laymen in his time, we may be fairly sure, had developed the singularly unconvivial habit of solitary reading for pleasure. Manuscripts primarily literary could not have been common, and they were customarily read in company, aloud. Very noteworthy, then, is Chaucer's repeated calling of attention to this personal trait of his. In The Book of the Duchess, he takes a romance to help him pass a sleepless night, considering it better amusement than backgammon or chess. In the Parliament, he again emphasizes his inveterate habit of reading for private profit or delight: the whole day passes unobserved in this manner. And no one can forget the eagle's mingled scorn and commiseration in The House of Fame for Geoffrey, who, for recreation after his day's work, shuts himself up like a hermit and sits dumb as a stone over his books until he's quite dazed—though we allow him for companionship spiced cakes and a chirping glass from the royal pitcher! Thus early we find Chaucer setting himself apart from his fellows as a reading man; and throughout his work he never lets us forget the fact. What we notice first in the dream-visions is the importance of books in the structure of the poems. The sequence made familiar by The Book of the Duchess and The Parlia-

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ment of Fowls is from sense-impressions to the pleasures of reading, and then to that heightened state of excitement in which the poem reaches what is at least its overt raison d'être. But it may be noticed that the timing differs in all four works. In The House of Fame, the reading is set inside the vision, where the poet traces the Aeneid scene by scene on the walls of Venus' temple, in a blend of picture and incised writing that had been briefly anticipated in the Duchess poem, where the dreamer's chamber walls and windows were similarly enriched with the Troy story and the Romance of the Rose—indeed, a kingly kind of illuminated manuscript. Dido's story is recounted in The House of Fame as if simultaneously read, seen, and heard; but the poet's interjected moral reflections on the action belong outside the dream, to the re-telling. Neither prologue to The Legend of Good Women contains any account of specific reading. Instead, there is, before the dream, a good deal about the value of books both old and new. The main use of reading in this work comes, of course, at the end of the dream, in the series of legends all drawn from books. These shifts of temporal sequence affect the organic connection between book and dream and give rise to questions of causal and logical relationship. Theoretically, the contents of the book and the dream do not need to be connected. The possible relations could extend from that extreme all the way to exact parallelism. The last might be insipid, however, and the first would be pointless. We may naturally assume that some sort of significantly calculated relation will subsist in the author's intention, whatever our estimate of the artistic merit, cunning, or success of his strategy. But it is for him to determine whether that relation shall be close or remote, obvious or subtle, direct or indirect: whether the book's connection with the dream shall be straightforward, oblique, or contradictory. Some of Chaucer's elder critics have been inclined to credit him with a minimum of artistic skill in his [37]

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ordonnance. He never used the same formula twice, and his variety in this has evoked responses equally diverse. Of the four vision-poems, The Book of the Duchess provides the nearest approach to a parallel between book and dream. Both are concerned with lovers separated by death, and the emotional attitudes of the bereaved exhibit the same hopelessness and intensity of grief. To Skeat, this parallel was sufficiently close; to Root, the connection was "so slight . . . that it constitutes a serious breach of artistic unity."1 In The Parliament of Fowls, the connection is far more problematical. Whatever else be granted, the relation between book and dream is here undeniably indirect and obscure. Scholars looking for obvious parallels have not hesitated to dismiss the synopsis of the Somnium Scipionis as utterly irrelevant: "an unfortunate bit of introductory machinery," Root dubbed it. "The book itself," Sypherd wrote in 1907, "has no special significance. It is merely the book which interests Chaucer at this time and which he is eager to tell about. He relates the story just as he relates the tale of Seys and Alcyone. The guide African leaves him at the entrance to the Park, and after that there is never a suspicion of any influence from the Somnium Scipionis."2 Few critics today—thanks to the rise in Chaucer's reputation as a craftsman—would maintain that he simply took the first story that came to hand as a means of launching his dream. Latterly, students have found it easier to conceive that ironic contrast may serve as an agent of artistic coherence. At present, it seems hard to deny a deliberate irony in that incongruous role of Scipio, the heavenly minded, as guide to the earthly paradise of Love. But the wider implications of ironic meaning are still in debate. Like Circe's wand, this poem has made monkeys of us all; or !R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer (revised), 1922, p. 61. W. O. Sypherd, Studies in Chaucer's Hous of Fame, 1908, p. 23.

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rather, has turned every scholar into an epitome of his own besetting obsession. It would scarcely be surprising if a scholarly poet with an ironic flair—and would it had been Leonard Bacon!—should write a new Parliament of Fowls in which the coy formel might stand for Chaucer's secret purpose and the other birds in the debate for the contending scholars. A kindly malice might assign the several roles without much change of expression, as: "My wit is sharp, I love no taryinge!" And "Yit were it bet for thee/ Han holde thy pes than shewed thy nycete!" "Who can a resoun fynde or wit in thaiT But if such a context gives new point to the words, each of us may elect his own contestants. We shall return to the Parliament shortly. In The House of Fame, whether the relation of the Aeneid to the dream proper be direct or oblique cannot be asserted with immediate assurance, because of the incomplete state of the poem as we know it today. The tale of Dido, as the poet tells it here, focuses almost singly on the faithlessness of men and the pity of love betrayed; and it occurs inside the dream. It seems unlikely that the conclusive "tiding," which was to bring the vision to its climax, would have run counter to this story by enforcing a contradictory import: that the lost part of the dream would have cancelled the earlier and authoritative part. It appears to be a controlling fact that the dream itself contains both elements, the classical tale and the "new tidings." Had Chaucer chosen to present, as preliminary reading before falling asleep, a tale of faithful lovers dignified by ancient authority, and then proceeded in his dream to the House of Rumour and a tale of modern intrigue, there would have been an implicit point in this reversal. Had he, instead, commenced, waking, with the tale of Dido's desertion, and ended, dreaming, with a report of true love rewarded, the rationale would be equally clear. As things stand, however, it seems rational to hypothesize a final tiding from the House [39]

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of Rumour tending in the same direction as the Dido legend. Under the circumstances, the conclusion would be sceptical and sardonic, rather than pathetic. The undependability of everything within Fame's purview—the influence there of whim and accident, the casual mixture of false and true— should make us slow to put reliance in any report circulating in the House of Rumour. Should perchance the man of great authority announce, or give assent to, the tidings which the poet had been transported thither to hear, the authenticity of that announcement would already have been impugned by the circumstances of its utterance. The poet, by his exaggerated outcry at the opening of his poem against malicious interpretation, and by these later circumstances, probably wished to disavow responsibility for the tidings, and to leave his immediate audience to their individual opinions. It seems more than possible, therefore, that the conclusion was a rumour of intrigue and betrayal like the Anelida and A rcite, or the connection figuratively embodied in the Complaynt of Mars, unflattering to someone highly placed. We might guess that it was deliberately removed before the poem was allowed to get into circulation, whether from motives of prudence or because with the passage of time the allusions had lost their aptness and point. Whatever the fact, we may sensibly infer a direct rather than an oblique relation between book and dream: a consistent following through of the spirited but disillusioned tone of the work as we now possess it. In The Legend of Good Women, the immediate relation between dream and books is explicitly declared in the prologue. It is one of simple cause and effect. At the end of the dream, the poet is ordered to do penance for his "antifeminist" writing by compiling a poetical calendar of women faithful in love. Thereupon, he immediately sets about complying with the command. True, the two versions of the prologue differ in the linking between dream and reading, [40]

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but the F-version's failure to mention an awakening was probably a mere inadvertence, rectified in G's revision: And with that word, of slep I gan awake, And ryght thus on my Légende gan I make.

We may take it that the dream-world and the book-world are here presented as in harmonious co-operation. But the whole question of these formal relations may be approached from the opposite direction—the direction from which the poet himself approached it. What came first to the creator's mind would naturally be, not the book, but the dream. The object or goal of the poem as a whole lay in the dream which was to be its artistic culmination. In the dream, therefore, lay implicit the determinative suggestion of the suitable kind or use of reading—the kind that might serve as an appropriate bridge to that other country, to the vision which was the poem's raison d'être. From this point of view, the relation, taken generally, is one of cause and effect in reverse order: the choice of reading is the effect of the dream-content, of which the book should appear to be the plausible but topsy-turvy cause. If we have faith in Chaucer's art, we must believe that this relation was predetermined, and should attribute to our own lack of insight, or to some historical accident, any failure to discern the point of the connection. We must not join Sypherd in subscribing to the pretty apology of Alceste: And eke, peraunter, for this man ys nyce, He myghte doon yt, gessyng no malice, But for he useth thynges for to make: Hym rekketh noght of what matere he take! (F, 362-365)

The poet who could invent that delightful excuse could hardly be guilty of the offence. Mediaeval writers, we are told, set no such store by the principle of "organic unity" as we do today. It might be safer to say that their delight in the incongruous, as many an ancient cathedral seems to testify

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in its details, was a good deal livelier than ours. But they were also worshippers of rational order and great builders of systems. Few readers would maintain that theme as a structural element was foreign to the mind of the poet who assembled the main blocks of The Canterbury Tales, or that the creator of Troilus and Criseyde was devoid of a sense of artistic unity. Where Chaucer expatiates unduly, as to our sense he sometimes does, it is because things crowd in upon him by association, not because he has to beat the bushes for matter to stuff a shapeless sack. We have more frequent occasion to complain of his impatience, in truth, than of his irrelevant prolixity. His common refrain is: "But it would take too long to go into it now!" And where he seems to be unsure of his purpose, it is safer for us to suspend judgment pending further enlightenment. When, therefore, Chaucer chooses to open The Book of the Duchess with the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, we may assume that he does so in the conviction that the tale strikes a note, and makes a pronouncement, and sets up vibrations, that are deeply consonant with the import of his poem. He has considered that his responsibility is to find a story harmonious with G aunt's recent bereavement. The Ovidian narrative fulfils this requirement: it establishes the mood, gently elegiac, adumbrated at the poem's commencement; and its reverberations echo in the sequel whenever the black knight breaks the course of his reminiscent narrative to complain of his loss and give voice to his despair and longing for death. It allows the humble friend, the poet, to express to the bereaved noble, indirectly, such consolation as one can offer in the presence of deep personal loss, the comfort of commiserating sympathy: Awake! let be your sorwful lyf! For in your sorwe there lyth no red. . . . To lytel while oure blysse lasteth! (202-211 )

It sheds the dignity of classical example, a poignant but [42]

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statuesque and generalized beauty, muted with distance, over the shock and clamour of present anguish. The Parliament of Fowls, whether or not it was prompted by current events, is a love-vision surprisingly unorthodox. The perplexities of love are the subject announced in the opening stanzas; love and its complexities are the subject of the birds' debate. This debate is the patent reason for the poem's existence: it is climax and end, and must in some form have been in Chaucer's mind from the start. Obviously, he wished to show love from various points of view, masculine and feminine, high and low; to exhibit the refined idealism of courtly love, and its unreality and egoism; the natural reactions of simple creatures incapable of such exaltation, and their useful but also self-centred motivation. To bring these all together was a practical difficulty. Courtly love is secret as to its particular object. Moreover, mere vulgarity is not necessarily amusing. There was also the realistic obstacle that the lower orders may not freely criticize their betters to their faces. Allegory, therefore, was essential. The inherent difficulties might be circumvented at one happy stroke by personifying all these conflicting points of view as types of birds. A vision would liberate from the inconveniences of verisimilitude and would give the ironic imagination much freer, and probably safer, play. Vision, moreover, would carry the question to levels of ultimate importance by showing these human contrasts in a vaster perspective of universal powers, the elemental forces of love and nature that influence heaven and earth. For presiding deity of so diverse a scene, he might take his cue from Alain's majestic conception of the goddess Nature, all-embracing and fructifying, "vicar of the almighty Lord"; and from the same source a hint of that arbitrary and self-willed divinity, the Venus whose confining temple walls signified exclusive dedication to her sole worship, and whose service was a consuming flame. The contrast between the large and life[43]

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giving bounty of the one and the anti-social inwardness of the other could be further developed by drawing upon Boccaccio's convenient and engaging account of the artifice of the Garden and Temple of Venus. Obviously, the debate was pre-ordained to show love as a cause of dissension, not of accord. Granting a kind of idealism in the self-abnegation of courtly love, it was still a private and restrictive virtue, and "tid thereof as often harm as prow." There were other, and perhaps better, kinds of idealism that refined spirits all too easily forgot: in particular, the disinterested habit of, not the private, but the honest public, servant, who spent himself for the common weal. Such was the lofty ideal that Cicero of old had raised for emulation; and it was a gauge by which to measure the worth of that finely spun sentiment upon which courtly lovers set such a premium. Why not invoke the promise of Africanus in Scipio's Dream, where he declared: What man, lered other lewed That lovede commune profyt, wel ithewed, He shulde into a blysful place wende, There as joye is that last withouten ende. . ..

(46-49)

It would be interesting to note the response to such a shock of an audience expecting the conventional celebration of love in a courtly poem for St. Valentine's Day. By some such train of thought, we may fancy, Chaucer might arrive at the rationale of his poem. He promises a love-vision, but even at the start there is a hint in his not referring to Love as a god but only as a feudal lord, and in his insistence on his personal detachment: he will say only, "God save swich a Lord!" He knows nothing of him at first hand, but what he reads of his tyranny is almost dumbfounding. He is very fond of reading—it is his idiosyncracy —and recently he was hot in pursuit of some information in an antique volume and read on eagerly the whole day long. [44]

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What it was he was seeking, he quite deliberately refrains from saying. Obviously, had he wished us to know, he would have told us. Not telling, under the circumstances, is concealing. But our curiosity is whetted, and naturally everyone expects him to produce documentary evidence, from his reading, of Love's "myrakles and his crewel yre"—something to bear out his speechless amazement. Instead, he proceeds to outline the Dream of Scipio, chapter by chapter: a work as far as possible from the track on which he had set our train of thought. Could any effect be more certainly calculated for surprise? For what do you think Africanus says, in Tully? He says that our present mode of existence is only a kind of death but, for the good, a dying into immortal bliss. And who are the good? They are those who find no delight in the life of the senses but exert their utmost efforts for the commonwealth. Lawbreakers and sensualists, on the contrary, when they die, shall age after age whirl painfully about the earth until they have atoned for their wickedness. Four times Africanus points his namesake the way into "that blysful place," "that hevene blisse," "that place deere" reserved for the "soûles cleere"; and when he appears in turn to the poet that night, to lead him into that blissful place, the paradisal garden of love, it would seem that the ironic point could hardly escape the most inattentive of Chaucer's listeners. As the poet dropped his book and prepared for bed, he was troubled, both because he had what (he says) he didn't want, and did not have what he wanted. The phrase was caught from Boethius' Consolatio, and it occurs where Philosophy is instructing her pupil that however great the abundance of earthly goods, man's needs and desires are not sufficed. This has a very present bearing on African's downright injunction, "That he ne shulde him in the world delyte"; and Chaucer, by his outline of Scipio's dream, has already set all earthly circumstance in a context that inevi-

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tably belittles the temporal in comparison with things eternal, both in quantity and quality. That this was his deliberate intention, who can doubt? Indeed, in a variety of ways, Chaucer tacitly declares, over and over, that in so far as his poem is a vision of terrestrial love it is written against the grain. At its conclusion, he blandly apologizes, saying that another time, with luckier reading, he hopes to meet with a more auspicious dream. This parting testimony to the poet's implicit assumption of a connection between book and dream, the implied allusion here to the reading that had so wryly conditioned this particular vision, has been very oddly ignored as an evidence of the poem's intended unity and deliberate ordonnance. The work, then, has moral depth and responsibility, a sound and coherent structure. But it has also unabashed lightness of heart; and in its own kind is a sort of Valentine's Day equivalent of a Midsummer Night's Dream. It is too nimble for criticism, which hops always behind. When we try to do justice to its serious implications, we lumber into travesty and all but extinguish its spirit of mocking gaiety. And when we try to appreciate its fun, we heavily explain or weakly paraphrase and quote, and fall short of its deeper meaning. Critical writing on this single poem is almost a paradigm of all the elucidatory inflections that have been tried on Chaucer's work through its whole extent. We have buried it under a mountain of commentary, both gravel and granite, only to find that, like Eulenspiegel, it was elsewhere during the obsequies. A few further remarks about the parliament (im) proper will provide demonstration of what has just been asserted. Among the bird-folk who take part in the debate, the social distinction of the principals inevitably involves the others in a relative rating; and though their seating in Nature's "house" does not rank them, Chaucer's classification into seed-fowl, water-fowl, and worm-fowl more than invites us

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to attach general labels to each from analogous human society. The simplest solution, in such a context, is surely the most acceptable. The purpose of Chaucer's allegory is not the propounding of riddles. The "fowles of ravyne," as all readers agree, correspond to the nobility great and lesser, whose proper business in feudal times was mainly to hunt, and to make love and war. The water-fowl are big and aggressive birds and they are the first of the commoners to come forward with a verdict. They have two spokesmen, the goose and the duck, one female and one almost certainly male, one chosen and one self-appointed, but both speaking to the same end. Their advice is strictly practical: to arrive at a working agreement, to get a return for the investment on both sides. It's as easy to fall in love "ther profyt sholde aryse" as to love where nothing can be gained. They would understand Tennyson's northern farmer: "Doàn't thou marry for munny, but goà wheer munny is!" These clues, in a satirical reference, are consistent with the mercantile class, and there are no indications to the contrary. The seed-fowl are next to give their verdict, in the person of the turtle-dove. They are clearly gentlefolk, and their point of view, while not martial, is fairly close to that of the nobility. They are country-dwellers, and they have the country conservatism and some idealism. They can appreciate the idea of fidelity without thought of reward, and loyalty even unto death is an ideal to which they respond. They are contemptuous of the materialism of the water-birds. Though modest, they are happily a numerous company and cover the greensward. Their elected spokesman, the turtle-dove, declares modestly that love is an ever-fixed mark, that bends not with the remover to remove. Then comes the turn of the worm-fowl, folk of a nondescript way of life, pickers-up of scraps. Their idea of the "comune spede," it develops, is not even so lofty as the quid pro quo of the water-fowl: it is every bird for himself. [47]

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"Only give me my mate," says the cuckoo, speaking for them all, "and you're welcome to go on disputing forever. If those others can't agree, let each live solitary all his life long!" The merlin, with heavy irony, bestows the fitting comment on this position. "Of course:—when the glutton has stuffed his paunch, how can anyone else be discontented?" It is evident that the worm-fowl are a miscellaneous lot, with neither a definable mode of living nor a code based on principle. In a pre-industrial society, the Masses lack a proper name. When we look back from the dream-debate to the book, we can discern a sufficient latent motivation for the political colouring. As a Valentine's Day poet, Chaucer had apparently—but deliberately—started off on the wrong foot. Cicero's political theory was no very orthodox springboard for a love-vision. But Chaucer, as royal ambassador in marriage negotiations, had seen love being made the specious pretext and nominal goal of the most cold-blooded bargaining for material and diplomatic advantage: "Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed/At starting, is my object!" So that, in an unexpected and ironic way, politics was an entirely appropriate leading-note for a love-vision. The poet had not ostensibly found what he had been looking for, but perhaps he had achieved something even more valuable—a surer basis for sound counsel. "For out of olde feeldes ... Cometh al this ne we corn from yer to yere." With continued study, he might on some lucky day attain his ideal: the felicity of a perfect coincidence between the wisdom acquired and the occasion to use it. On that day, the double sense of the word rede, a word upon which in his last stanza he lays such purposive stress by fourfold repetition, will be fused in perfect accord. Reading and counselling will be united in the harmonious function of the scholardiplomat. Tully, in fact, had pointed the way, and in his own person had realized the wished-for fusion. [48]

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Resuming, now, our comparative search for the rationale of these poems, we find ourselves, in The House of Fame, precluded from approaching the reading by way of the poem's climax because we lack certain knowledge of what the latter was, or was to have been. We assume that the climax was the original idea from which the rest of the work germinated, and that therefore in Chaucer's conception the story of Dido was appropriate anticipatory matter. The necessary conditions would have been met if in the conclusion the crowd pressing towards the man of great authority had parted to disclose a man and a woman (i.e., their simulacra) in altercation before him, complaint being preferred by the woman in a narrative sufficient to carry the scene effectively. For a knowing audience, there would have been clues to individual identities, short of positive certainty: For though I telle noght his propre name, Men shal wel knowe that it is the same, By signes, and by othere circumstances. (Canterbury Tales, VI, 417-419)

As a love-vision, the poem would appear to have been planned as a kind of palinode, somewhat disproportioned by Chaucer's imagination having been over-stimulated by his two inventions, the eagle and the goddess Fame. The moral of the whole might have been, to adopt the words of Pandaras: O tonge, allas! so often here-byforn Hath mad ful many a lady bright of hewe Seyd "weilaway, the day that I was born!" And many a maydes sorwe for to newe. And for the more part, al is untrewe That men of yelpe, and it were broughte to prevé. Of kynde non avauntour is to leve. (Ill, 302-308)

Boasting and lying and infidelity go together, and the poet probably came back to earth a sadder, wiser, and even more disillusioned man than when the eagle carried him away. [49]

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The poem, obviously, would lose point were there not some topical allusion concealed at the end. For then, the conclusion, more than merely harmonious, would be made out of the same classical or legendary stuff as the beginning, which would be too savourless. And it was, we recall, to hear "tidings" that Geoffrey was transported from his books. He was to "pause awhile from learning, to be wise!" But the truncated ending taken together with the Ernulphian curse at the opening against those who "mysdemen" the poem through malice, presumption, hate, scorn, envy, despite, jest, or villainy, more than suggests that he felt he was running special risks of giving offence, and that perhaps it was wisest of all to suppress what he had learned. We might have expected The Legend of Good Women to commence—as it does not—in the following way: The poet thinks about the power of love, and about its precariousness: especially about the sad lot of women who yield their hearts and fortunes with entire trust, only to be betrayed and abandoned. Not that he has any first-hand evidence to bring forward. But in the course of his reading, he has come upon many instances of such unhappiness. He accepts such stories as truth. He is generally inclined to give faith and reverence to books for preserving the history of former generations. One has, of course, to take many things on trust, considering that the possibilities of knowledge through personal observation are so very limited. He was reading, of late, in an ancient book in which he came upon the story of a lady once Queen of Thrace. This noble woman, he learned, chose to give up her own life and go down to Hades that her husband might live, She did so, and was later rescued by Hercules, who brought her back to the land of the living. The poet thought he had never heard of greater unselfishness and sacrifice. While he was meditating upon her story, he fell asleep and began to dream.

The dream into which he lapsed was, as it developed, much on the order of that which forms the substance of the Prologue we now have in version G of the extant work. It is fairly easy to guess why Chaucer did not follow the [50]

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foregoing routine in the present case. Looking back over the finished course, one understands at once why it would not have done. The object, here, is to establish a frame for a series of time-honoured stories about women true in love. If the poet put the best one of all in the form of introductory reading, the climax would have been reached before the vision occurred. Or, supposing that he had merely told a story of this kind, recounting it at the outset as introductory reading, the effect of the subsequent dream could only be that of an injunction to wake up and get on with his reading and consequent versifying. The dream would be an ineffectual interruption. If the purpose of the vision was to motivate the writing of stories of faithful women, none of these, obviously, could be allowed precedence of the vision. And if one hoped to pay special tribute to a living lady figuratively represented as one of the story-heroines, the artistic way would not be to tell her history at the very beginning. One might, on the contrary, save that history for the end of the series, to pay her climactic honour; but people may die before ambitious poems are completed, and the tribute was in order now, at once. Honour, therefore, must be paid in the prologue itself. Still looking at the problem as if before composition, we have found that an acceptable way of opening such a poem as this is to talk of reading. Tribute to written authority will make weight eventually by reinforcing the credibility of the "cases'9 to be cited out of old authors, and will sound a harmonious prelude. But mere talk of books makes an awkward pathway to dream. Chaucer acknowledges the fact in The Legend of Good Women, and pleads for our patience: But wherfore that I spak, to yive credence To olde stories and doon hem reverence, And that men mosten more thyng beleve Then men may seen at eye, or elles prevé,— That shal I seyn, whanne that I see my tyme; I may not al at-ones speke in ryme. (F, 97-102)

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How, then, to get to the dream itself without recounting a particular tale? As we now know, the answer is, to let the description of actual nature for once anticipate the landscape of dream. Let the real scene be concentrated upon with intentness, as though it were a delightful book—the Book of Nature, as Curtius has noted, was already a familiar metaphor—and let the dream steal upon the poet engaged in this delightful study. Then the dream may properly reflect the* waking pleasure: The wery huntere, slepynge in his bed, To wode ayeyn his mynde goth anon. (Parliament of Fowls, 99-100)

The daisy upon which the poet has been brooding with passionate intensity may thereupon, in his dream, be transfigured into the beautiful queen who comes to intercede for him with the God of Love. The parallel here with the Parliament is undeniably close. As Scipio passes over from the book into the dream, altering his role yet remaining recognizable, linking the two states of awareness, so here the daisy, by apotheosis, becomes the connecting link between the real and the dream-world. But now the device is handled with far greater finesse. Scipio discharges his office and at once disappears, whereas Alceste becomes the controlling figure of the whole vision, integrating the work and justifying all that follows. The differences between the two prologues are so important that distinct poems are the result. The change in temperature from F (the earlier version) to G is from caldo to freddo, and cannot but strike every reader sensitive to climatic conditions. In F, the poet appears to display a continuous and intense personal involvement. In G, on the contrary, the tone of everything that is revised or now first introduced is invariably soberer, more detached, more suited to advancing years. It would be a welcome task to trace the [52]

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details, but time forbids. One instance may be given, a new couplet in G, spoken by Alceste: Whil he [Chaucer] was yong, he kepte youre [Love's] estât; I not where he be now a renégat. (400-401)

The striking differences centre round the treatment of the daisy and its double personification. F presents the flower, the daisy, as a feminine singular; G, as plural or neuter: the change is from "this flour" to "these floures," from "she" to "it." The lyric outburst in F, beginning in the third person and passing at once to direct address, is cancelled in G. This is the passage in F : She is the clernesse and the verray lyght That in this derke world me wynt and ledeth. The hert in-with my sorwfull brest yow dredeth And loveth so sore that ye ben verrayly The maistresse of my wit, and nothing I . . . . Be ye my gide and lady sovereyne! (84-94)

Thus, F makes little or no secret of the fact that the flower all the while is the poet's earthly goddess. When he sees her in the dream, it is only continuing his adoration, to offer the ballade in her praise as his private tribute (not the tribute, as in G, of the carolling ladies) : For as the sonne wole the fyr disteyne, So passeth al my lady sovereyne, That ys so good, so faire, so debonayre. (F, 274-276)

The inference is unforced, therefore, that in the glow of his first inspiration the poet did not wish to conceal the fact that he was paying a personal tribute, justifying thereby the extravagance of his devotion to the Marguerite, and of course maintained throughout her reincarnation as Alceste. Revising, he felt constrained to eliminate the evidence of this private involvement, actual or assumed. It might be a sign of actuality that in F he had neglected, or did not care,

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to divide the dream from its consequences by mentioning an awakening. And with that word my bokes gan I take, And right thus on my Légende gan I make. (F, 578-579)

It may readily be granted that the changes of G produce an effect of better organization, greater unity, simpler relation of parts, surer control, and a generally tidier poem. But they also rob it of the appealing urgency of the more complex and psychologically more fascinating original version. More than one scholar has conjectured that Alceste in the Legend prologue is allegorically meant for Queen Anne, who in 1386 (a likely date for F) had been four years married to Richard, had reached the age of twenty, and who but six years later was to die of the pestilence. Skeat and a series of distinguished Germans regarded the identification as virtually certain, but there are famous names in the opposition, and we must side with the latter. To pose doubts and objections is easier by far than to produce convincing proof of personal identities from internal evidence. Yet, since rashness is the assumed prerogative of those who will not stay for an answer, let us now put questions. Can the following queries be met in such a way as to leave the hypothesis intact? Would Chaucer have felt it appropriate to associate the daisy, with its French name and French associations, and Richard's Queen, with her Bohemian origins and quite different name? And if the marguerite was already connected with the Queen in some social and literary cult, is it likely that no trace of the fact would have survived? Would Chaucer have thought it appropriate to pay his devotions to Her Majesty in the glowing terms employed by a courtly lover addressing his mistress, even at times laying aside the decorum of figurative statement? Would he have dared? Temperamentally, could he have found it possible? [54]

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Would Chaucer have been so graceless as to equate the Queen with the tragic, self-sacrificial figure of Alcestis, who died that her husband's life might be prolonged? And would he, if he chose to pay her that compliment, immediately then cancel it out by causing Alceste herself to refer to the Queen as a third person?— And whan this book ys maad, yive it the Quene, On my [Alceste's] byhalf, at Eltham or at Sheene. (F, 496-497)

Revising the poem after the Queen's death, would Chaucer then feel obliged to remove all those more passionate expressions of personal devotion which in her lifetime would certainly have been the height of presumption but which perhaps now might have a chance to pass into history as an idealizing memorial tribute? Would he choose such a time to expunge them, supposing him to have been motivated by any genuine sentiment? Would consideration for Richard have prompted such action rather than suppressing the poem? Was he going to read it again at court? And if the expressions, sincere as they seem, were merely artificial, why should he now be concerned to rub and scrape? With the identification of Alceste as Queen Anne has gone a parallel identification of the God of Love as King Richard. This assumption raises considerations broader than might seem to be suggested by a simple equation. We have to look at the matter from two directions; for if the God of Love stands in the poem for Richard, Richard stands likewise for the God of Love. Of course, we ought not to handle gossamer as if it were buckram; but psychological effects have natural causes. Now Richard, looked at as the God of Love, carries to our sense an air of flim-flam. To require this role of him is not to honour or exalt him but to reduce his actual dignity to the level of amateur theatricals and puerile make-believe:

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And in his hand me thoghte I saugh him holde Twoo firy dartes, as the gledes rede, And aungelyke hys wynges saugh I sprede. (F, 234-236)

For Richard, this role was not important, whatever its meaning for his foreign envoy and trusted man of affairs. When this king speaks, it is to accuse the poet of being his foe, recreant both in work and in deed, one who has renounced his law and hindered others from loving, by writing Troilus and Criseyde and translating the Rose. The king (Richard?) threatens the poet with cruel pains for these heresies. He then, however, graciously forgives him at the intercession of Aleaste ( Anne?), who on her part engages that Chaucer will spend the most of his time henceforth in composing a glorious legend of faithful women and false men (rather than in the performance of his further duties as Clerk of the King's Works). If the poet will do this, says Richard qua Cupid, he is content to let him go free. But he must be sure to introduce the Queen's own story (Alceste's) and it will be best to begin his book with the legend of Cleopatra. He may choose his own metres and he will be wise to summarize and abridge where possible, lest his Te Deum turn to simple tedium. If somewhat of this sort is what happens to Richard impersonating the God of Love, the effect on the God of Love is equally, or more, disastrous when he plays Richard. Love as a personified abstraction has, to give his ideal image authority and power over our imagination, the tributary joys and sorrows of a hundred generations of humankind. There is no doubt (in our hearts) of the reality "of his myrakles and his crewel yre." What the poet has to say of him in description as he moves over the meadow of dream, a youthful figure of unearthly brightness and fresh beauty, aweinspiring, subtracts nothing from his divine idea. He is angellike, a paradisal being: his garments woven in an air of glory, his golden hair crowned with a sun, his face almost [56]

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too radiant for mortal eyes. The supreme compliment of his leading by the hand the Queen Alceste, flower-like in green, pearl-white, and gold, exalts her, too, into the realm of the ideal— So womanly, so bénigne, and so meke, That in this world, thogh that men wolde seke, Half hire beauté shulde men nat fynde In creature that formed y s by kynde. (F, 243-246)

The measure of her ideality, and the height of the compliment that Chaucer may be paying to an earthly creature whom she partly symbolizes, are clearly established by the ethereality of the God of Love. If the latter be not inviolate, the other sinks likewise to favour and to prettiness. And that transcendence cannot be preserved while we think of an earthly figure in the god's borrowed graces. It is essential for the full effect of the poem that the image of Love be kept free from every personal human equation. Questions thus arise as to the effective limits of such allegorical personifications. Here is a figure, MargueriteAlceste, of whom we feel that, if we could name her counterpart in Chaucer's waking life, our intimate appreciation of the poem would be enhanced and enriched. There is another, the God of Love, who can only be debased by the imposition of human features, to the detriment of the work of art as a whole. The mind appears to be extremely sensitive in estimating the balance between its ideas of persons and their symbolic representation for a particular purpose or a selective emphasis. If the emphasis goes one way, the result is caricature; if the other, glorification. If the symbol chosen is too vast, too exalted, too inhuman, or simply too definitely alien, the imagination balks at the substitute. We have no difficulty in accepting the Lady Blanche and the Man in Black, in The Book of the Duchess, as the courtly images of the Duke and Duchess of Gaunt, however much idealized. But Fortune in [57]

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that poem is unthinkable as surrogate for any human creature; as are, in the other dream-visions, Venus, Nature, Fame; and here, the God of Love. In The House of Fame, the eagle, to be sure, is human enough, but his superhuman function as celestial flying-machine makes absurd any possible human reference—though he can simulate a familiar voice. Had he simply said "Come!" and had the poet thereupon found himself moving through space or already arriving at Fame's palace, knowing not how, the eagle might have been allegorically serviceable; but then wings too would have been unnecessary for this kind of zodiacal trapeze-work, as previously they had been in Scipio's dream. But, on the contrary, the earth-bound eagles in the Parliament of Fowls cause us no trouble as potential representatives of elevated personages. Here, no use is made of their avian character except to impart an aura of ironic fantasy. They are birds altogether human, even to their blushes. But, for the sake of comedy, the baser fowl, though also human, act and chatter like birds. We are guarded against thought of the diet of the formel eagle and her suitors; but we are often reminded of the lower orders' less disgusting fare: the latter becomes a means of definition. Precisely the same sort of ironic picture is drawn, with greater fullness and humorous complexity, of Chauntecler and Pertelote in double exposure, where the personification and the natural interact with mutual entertainment, so that we can hardly decide which is the personification and which the actuality, which sense and which symbol: whether birds are being personified as man and wife, or humanity gallinized as cock and hen. The proper naming is, of course, an essential part of the technique; and by his choice the Nun's Priest, even as he commences, intends to leave no doubt from which side we are to take our bearings. Human proper names in this case, however appropriate, would have significantly altered the point of view. But the birds in the dream-visions have to get

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on as best they may with their generic appellatives alone. Further distinctions would only have encumbered them in their function as class-representatives; and even the principals benefit from their anonymity. True names here would have destroyed the fantasy; classical names would have been ridiculous; royal names would have been dangerous; courtly names would have been insipid; Christian names would have been humiliating. All that has been said is but a narrow review of these endlessly fascinating poems, which exhibit so many individual beauties and such swift advances in mastery of convention and freedom of invention and imagination. They display, besides, many signs of Chaucer's growing concern about his status as a poet: so much so that reputation comes to seem almost more central, more truly the subject of The House of Fame and the Legend, with its built-in bibliography, than the dream-vision itself. But this is a waking solicitude; and we must keep pace with the poet's shift of attention, and see how he faces another kind of reality.

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3. BY DAY IT is TIME NOW to turn our thoughts away from the dreamvisions and their special problems, and to consider Chaucer's rendition of the world he saw around him by daylight. Let us look for a while at his companions of the Tabard and the road. A universal chorus of praise has always been rightly accorded to the felicity of Chaucer's devising of the Canterbury pilgrimage, on account of its capacity for bringing into unforced, dynamic association a range of representative persons, divergent in vocations, interests, and tastes. As a cross-section of society, the picture strikes every one as extraordinarily inclusive; although the absence of the noble class has been noticed, and doubtless thoughtful readers have regretted the relative scarcity of women in the company. These subtractions, it is recognized, are a natural consequence of the scheme itself, which "realistically" made their presence unlikely. There are other limitations or restrictions, partly inherent in the scheme, partly it may be temperamental, which are characteristic and revealing. If we plot the positive and

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negative reactions of men to their fellows on a line of which the dividing centre is the zero of human indifference, we shall find, when we examine the mutual sentiments of the pilgrims, that the emotional range is almost wholly, so far as it is expressed in act or word, on the negative half of the line. Generally speaking, it lies between the neutral point of formal politeness and tacit to violent dislike. The Host's deference to the Prioress is not the index of his true feeling; and the Cook's reactions to the Manciple, in so far as they are positive, display love not for the man but for his can. The nearest approach to genuine friendly warmth is the Franklin's outgoing commendation of the Squire. Nor do we incline to except the love-duet of the Pardoner and Summoner (alto con basso). Thus gamesters united in friendship are found Though they know that their industry all is a cheat.

The over-all tone among the pilgrims is on the cold rather than the warm side of the spectrum of human relations. Since Chaucer makes constant use of their mutual reactions, it is to be observed, therefore, that he depends on hostility for the dynamics of his "drama." We remember, however, that he has given us several groups of people bound already by ties either personal or professional. There are the Knight, his son, and his servant; the Parson and his brother; the Prioress, her chaplain, and their priest; the five guildsmen and their cook; and two pairs travelling together as friends, the Lawyer and the Franklin, and the Summoner and his compeer, the Pardoner. Now, in the linking scenes, none of these is ever shown in friendly relations with another of his group, nor is any one of them ever heard to address a solitary syllable to his close companion. Although we assume that they usually rode and conversed together, yet for all we ever hear or see, each one of them might as well be unaware of the others' existence

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during the journey. We never get an inkling of their mutual regard. If we object that it would have been improper for Chaucer to eavesdrop on the conversation of intimates, the objection will not hold very far. Do friends never speak to one another in terms suitable to be overheard? And do they never come to one another's support in argument or other need? Or how far does Chaucer feel bound by naturalistic restrictions? Surely, he tells us much about his companions that he could never have learned on that first evening at the Tabard, or even during the whole length of the journey. And on the other hand, some of the self-disclosures volunteered by certain of the pilgrims were so revealing as to come ringing down the centuries. The most outspoken of the confessions come from companionless individuals (pace the Pardoner)—a consideration that may be felt to have prompted and emboldened them. But this only confirms the fact that each of the pilgrims is fundamentally alone, detached from his fellows; and that their fellowship is strictly "by aventure," and visibly precarious. (One has the impression that Boccaccio's society in the Decameron is not only more friendly but sweeter-natured, much more inclined to those playful exchanges that take for granted a mutual goodwill.) Moreover, the alignments of Chaucer's people do not change during the pilgrimage—unless for the worse. No one of them is seen to alter his feeling towards a connection closer or more friendly than what it was at the beginning; still less to cross over from hostility to friendliness. Those very possibilities that would become the stock in trade of later generations of story-tellers—the shifting patterns of human relations—are left untouched and unexplored by this great master of narrative art. So far as concerns the Canterbury Tales as "drama," it must finally be admitted that in effect it proceeds entirely between strangers and is motivated chiefly by latent antagonisms. And, of course, this mutual hostility is pro[62]

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jected into the stories themselves, which in at least half a dozen cases and probably more are told at someone else's expense, to pay off a grudge. Not all these oppositions are equally conspicuous, however, nor are they of the same sort. One of the most amusing is the professional rivalry of the Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner over the Wife of Bath. All these men have a special interest—a very particular concern—with the Wife. When she talks, they are certain to be close at hand, and each of them gives careful study to her reminiscences, even to the point of interrupting with question and comment. This is no accident: she is their natural prey and they are stalking her. They are conscious rivals—not for the dubious privilege of becoming her sixth, but for her purse. Potentially, she is very vulnerable to some of the weapons they know how to use; and whether by working on her superstitions, or by blandishment, barratry, or blackmail, they mean to take their illegitimate toll. To change the figure, she is indeed the ripest and fairest plum de luxe they have seen this many a day; and ere she escape, it will go hard but they pull her down to their reach. This common aim exacerbates the mutual hatred of the Friar and Summcner, jealous of advantage with the Wife. She appears to be well aware of their predatory views, however, and pays glancing acknowledgment to the danger in her ironic reference to "limitours" as the modern incubi who pass to and fro bringing women to disgrace. Another pair of natural opposites, apparently so designed and set side by side in the General Prologue, are the Merchant and the Clerk. The Merchant is a type of worldliness that Chaucer had reason to know well from his city and diplomatic life: the shrewd practicer of business ethics, wearing the insignia of prosperity. His hat, a Flemish beaver, he had bought at a bargain price, probably when last he had occasion to go over to Middleburgh. "You know you can

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buy a fine hat there at a mere fraction of what they cost here." His pompous discourse was always in that area: "sownynge alwey th'encrees of his wynnyng." Nobody could say that he owed money anywhere: he was too smart for that! But the Clerk! he was the very opposite. Money simply fled from him, and why should he not be owing? He was the epitome of unworldliness. He never thought of appearances, and whatever was given or lent he would spend not on clothes or a better horse but on books. He, too, spoke deliberately but to quite another purpose: "sownynge in moral vertu was his speche." Two such opposite philosophies were born to be enemies. The calculated contrast of the General Prologue is further illustrated and defined in their respective stories—how sharply is not always appreciated. The Merchant could be counted on for scornful opposition on any ground. But the Clerk chooses the ground, by leading in time. The Merchant picks up the challenge on the Clerk's ground: not his proper subject-matter at all. Yet he can hardly wait for the Clerk to finish, and comes in like an echo on his concluding words. The Clerk has told of a marquis of Lombardy and his paragon of a wife, chosen on rational principle. Very well: the Merchant will tell likewise of a knight of Lombardy and his wife, also selected on theory. The story commences almost like a parody, undertaken to destroy the Clerk's incorrigible idealism. (Does gentle Goldsmith nostalgically describe Sweet Auburn? Then crabbed Crabbe will show you what a real village is like. ) The Merchant may in fact be mocking the Clerk by ironically adopting his position at moments, in that rather mystifying introduction. For sixty years, his knight lived unwedded, always following his sexual appetite, "As doon thise fooles that been seculeer." Not we ascetics like the Clerk! No indeed! The dart is set up for virginity; and if I praise marriage, it goes without saying that "I speke of folk in seculer estaat."

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Nothing in the General Prologue had prepared us for a story from the Merchant about married life. But he had been exasperated by the idealistic picture of wifely patience just painted by the Clerk. Still, this might not seem enough to justify such a lava-flow as the Merchant's Tale, and Chaucer seems to have felt the need of rationalizing it. The Merchant was the last man we should have expected to divulge his private affairs; but why should he be so vitriolic on the marriage question, even though goaded by the Clerk, unless his own shoe pinched? Hence Chaucer writes a prologue in which the cat is let out of the bag. This is not the proper place to pursue the topic, but it is a great temptation to reopen the whole question of the Merchant's putative savage and sustained irony. I will only say that I believe it to have been greatly overemphasized. It is difficult to believe that the poet, who has assigned to himself so weighty a preachment as the Melibeus, wherein is incorporated at length with due citation of exalted authority, the praise of woman as wrought for man's help—praise certainly intended as fruitful doctrine—could turn about and, in the person of one of his creatures, closely paraphrase the very same passage, giving the same biblical and other authority, not in the least spirit of fun but with all the bitterness that readers have lately found there: "one of the most amazing instances of sustained irony in the language," says Kittredge; "the bitterest satire," says Tatlock, "that Chaucer has anywhere permitted himself."1 However terrible for these and other readers, we may reasonably doubt that it seemed so to Chaucer, or that he was expressing a private and passionate disillusion through the Merchant. But with all subtractions, satiric it remains, and ostensibly motivated by personal animosity towards the Clerk and towards the Wife of Bath. iG. L. Kittredge, Modem Philology, IX (April, 1912), p. 452; J. S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works, 1907, p. 198. Cf. also C. Hugh Holman, ELH, xviii (1951), p. 242.

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Such a spirit of geniality and good-humour pervades the Tales as a whole that the foregoing negative account will surely be resisted by most lovers of Chaucer, as belying the truth of the work. The facts, however, appear incontrovertible and it is therefore worth while to inquire a little into this paradox. Partly, I think, it is an indirect result of the basic social factor conditioning Chaucer's writing as a whole, and partly a reflection of his character and temperament. Chaucer wrote for the ends of social entertainment and he wrote always from the point of view of one who himself in person would be giving that entertainment. There can be no question of his power to entertain, and part of that gift resides in a phenomenal ability to make every one of his hearers believe in a personal, almost a private, bond between the poet and himself. He creates a sense not only that he is talking to us but that there is even a unique intimacy and confidence between us and that he is counting on it. We seem to be sharing in his hidden thoughts; to be getting more of his meaning than others can be getting. This, no doubt, is because of his habitually ironic expression, which is continually telling us either more or less than what the actual words are saying, or else something different that we understand because we—we happy few—are in the secret. So that our self-flattering persuasion is not altogether an illusion. He is counting on our special understanding, on our quick and sympathetic awareness of an inner meaning. But this ironic habit of discourse, by its very nature, contains an excluding, as well as an including, principle. We are inside because we know a private language which keeps out those unwanted dullards who are too unimaginative, too imperceptive and matter-of-fact, to learn to speak and understand it. They persist in calling a spade a spade. We know that a rose by any other name smells far sweeter because it's then a private possession, to be shared only with our inti[66]

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mates. When we use this language, we are talking among ourselves; and when we use it to talk about other people, we inevitably "withdraw into our happiness" and leave them outside. This makes for cool and objective personal observations, a detachment from the world beyond our immediate circle. And this is precisely Chaucer's manner in a social context. So that that preternatural sense of intimacy which he establishes with us is, in a way, at the expense of others. That this is a congenial social posture for his satiric temperament no one can doubt. There is never question of his large tolerance, geniality, and good nature. These qualities suffuse all that he writes. Yet it is with an amused detachment that he views the human scene. It is along these lines, therefore, that I should seek to account for the paradoxical combination of so much stand-offishness among his human subjects in the Canterbury pilgrimage and such heart-warming humanity in his style of reporting on them. We are not deeply involved with them, nor does he ask us to be; but we are very personally involved with him, to our delight, and with his entire assistance. For he is almost the only figure in his "drama" who is fully realized psychologically, and who truly matters to us. When we come to look at the persons whom Chaucer describes so vividly in the General Prologue, we are impressed by the high degree of individualization that he gives to many of them. It is hard to avoid a suspicion that he must have seen them so, as he went about his affairs from day to day; that they are his living contemporaries: He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre.... His berd as any so we or fox was reed, And therto brood, as though it were a spade. Upon the cop right of his nose he hade A werte, and theron stood a toft of herys, Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys; His nosethirles blake were and wyde. (I, 549-557)

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at once for transcripts from observation, and a search among the records for their originals, by a duly qualified researcher, seems eminently sensible, to the limit of the records. Manly, as v/e know, for years conducted such a search, and the evidence or "new light" that he amassed is at first quite persuasive. Later, we begin to have doubts which increase the more we ponder the matter. If, as Manly believed, these characters would have been readily identifiable by their contemporaries, must not Chaucer have intended them to be recognized? And if recognition was part of the fun, must he not have calculated and accepted the concomitant risks? One could play at this game and lose by succeeding too well. And the risks, in that lawless and high-handed time, were decidedly unpleasant. If one could be assaulted, beaten, and robbed while on the King's business, and relieved of the King's money, personal spite might add considerably to the hazards of travelling the King's highways. From all we know of him, Chaucer was a peaceable man, neither given to picking quarrels nor likely to go out of his way to offend. Considering how extremely reticent he was in allusion to current events (which are seldom either armed or ready to bite the passer-by), would it not be surprising if in this one especially perilous kind of current reference, he had allowed himself a free rein, indulging his satirical talents with reckless carelessness for a moment's applause? The greater the success, the greater the danger, for he could hardly hide what everyone wanted to hear, or withhold it from wider circulation until after he died. The easy assumption on which Manly works is that the more details we find agreeing with a historical individual, the closer we come to conviction that we have identified Chaucer's portrait. For example, he collects many striking correspondences between the Shipman and John Hawley of Dartmouth, in the eighties much in the public ear because of his freebooting activities on the high seas. But Manly con[68]

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eludes: "It is not to be supposed that John Hawley, for all that we find . . . , was the original of Chaucer's Shipman. Hawley was too wealthy, distinguished, and perhaps too courtly a person to figure as the rough sailor. . . . "2 And he settles for a lesser man, instead. But would not the very reasons Manly gives for rejecting Hawley as a possibility serve almost equally well in his favour? The parallels are sufficiently abundant and striking to call up the idea of Hawley in everyone's mind. Yet the differences are also so notable as to prevent any one's certainly claiming, "This is the man!" If—as is not difficult—we are willing to grant that Chaucer, like most artists with a bent for natural verisimilitude, drew from living models and thought of individuals when he wrote, would he not also take care to falsify the record significantly as he worked? If so, the very failure in perfect correspondence would then be potentially a suspicious circumstance; while, on the contrary, Manly's strongest cases would have to be rejected, because his working principle is undermined by the still stronger probability that Chaucer would have obliterated the resemblance had he known of it. But, furthermore, in a world as yet unaccustomed, so far as we can now discover, to the practice of literal portraiture, it is hard to invent plausible reasons why the poet might wish to be confined within a strait-jacket promising such serious inconveniences. And among these last, he might discover a final awkwardness in the choice of the right stories to attribute to such actual acquaintances. Every psychological and historical probability, therefore, points away from Manly's hypothesis. As a theory, it is anachronistic. Against supposed identifications, we had better write, Not proved. Moreover, Manly himself observes that some of the portraits in the tales, such as the Miller's Alison, are quite as brilliantly specific as those of the General Prologue. Were they then factual, too? 2

J. M. Manly, Some New Light on Chaucer, 1926, p. 178.

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When Chaucer first conceived the Canterbury scheme, in all likelihood he did not foresee any change of technique or style to be implicit in it. Probably, one consideration which especially recommended it in his eyes was that in it he would be able to incorporate a number of stories already written and lying by. The conditions of his life as a poet had always meant the seizing of occasions or the response to demands. His associates must often have seen him in the role of occasional entertainer. His poetry was the product of the leisure hours of a busy man continually occupied with workaday affairs. Through the middle years of his life, in the midst of "reckoning" of customs duties at the Port of London, or workmen's accounts of Westminster and Windsor royal building operations and overseeing the Thames Embankment, or journeys at home and abroad on state matters, it is a wonder that he managed to salvage time and energy for so much reading and so much writing; and twenty times a wonder that he was able to produce a single work so sustained, so ample, and so carefully modulated as the Troilus. His habitual performances were worked up on the scale and for the purpose of an evening's entertainment. If he looked ahead as a poet in middle age—and there are clear signs in The House of Fame and the Legend Prologue that he did—he could not reasonably expect the conditions of artistic composition to change very much. He could expect always to be called upon for pieces—preferably narratives entertaining or improving, or both—short enough to be heard through at a sitting. The very fact that he had already met this sort of demand many times, and that he knew it was likely to continue, may well have emboldened him to outline the Canterbury scheme on so grandiose a scale: four tales from each pilgrim, two going and two returning home. His friend Gower could have carried the plan through. But, for Chaucer, there were successive revelations as imagination was fired by the characters he had called into being, by [70]

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their personalities and their latent frictions. And it can only have been as the plan began to be realized in finished work that Chaucer saw the dramatic implications in new perspective, and only very late that he came to full awareness that the context affected the stories themselves, their impact and their significance, and that it might entail still further changes of narrative technique, as it insinuated itself into the conduct and colouring of the tales through a point of view dramatically imagined for one of his characters. There is every evidence that these possibilities did not come in a rush to his consciousness but dawned on him by degrees. It appears that his habit of working, both before and after he had conceived the Canterbury frame, was to take a story he liked and compose it in his own fashion according to his usual manner, for separate reading, without shading it to suit an alien personality. After he had composed the General Prologue—probably in the mid-eighties—this served him as a tentative guide for the assignment of the new tale. Next, he would think about the selected narrator and write a new prologue, perhaps taking hints from the story as well as from the General Prologue. Lastly, he might write an epilogue, perhaps combining it with a prologue to another tale, as a genuine link. Not more than half a dozen of the tales are so deeply impressed with the character of the teller that they would not have been self-sufficient, had Chaucer wished to use them independently of the frame. Those few that are dramatically marked are so in varying degree, from an occasional interruption by other speakers, to an interpolation "in character," to an unmistakably dramatic impregnation of the whole texture. When the poet had conceived the possibility of further characterizing the speakers by means of Jiis story, as in the Wife's tale, he was well advanced towards genuine drama. But it is obvious that, in an oral reading, nothing that is intended to count in .our reception of a tale can be left for revelation in an epilogue. [71]

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The ground must be prepared in advance, as in the Monk's case. The Nun's Priest's epilogue, even had it not been cancelled, would in the hearing have made no active contribution to his tale. Chaucer may not have realized when he wrote the General Prologue that he was sowing difficulties—cockles in his clene corn—that would spring up later to plague him. If a story was already written, it might not easily fit any character, and at best its appropriateness would be a matter of luck. If no story was at hand, he would have to hunt for one that was at least not unsuitable to the character as previously described. And if a story did not suit the assigned character, it would have to be brought into line, or awkward questions might arise. He must in the end have been glad that he had left some of his people uncharacterized, so that the blank could now be filled in with a specific prologue to introduce the chosen story, or that, meanwhile, the story might do what it could by itself to suggest a character. It is often evident that the poet's procedure in this matter is rather opportunistic—even high-handed. The clear promise of the General Prologue may be disregarded, and Chaucer may take a new direction in the tale, justifying it or not by a special prologue. The Man of Law, the Monk, the Physician, the Merchant, the Franklin, and the Manciple are all cases raising this kind of question. Among these, the problem of the Monk and his tragedies is too engaging to be allowed to pass without further inspection. Whether or not Chaucer originally planned a De Casibus independent of the frame of The Canterbury Tales, he could hardly have anticipated what would happen to its psychic dimensions when set into that dramatic context. Anticipated or not, it proved to be one of his most inspired coups to assign it to the Monk. This daring and totally unforeseen stroke adds for us today an entirely new, surprising, yet credible dimension to that character. It is impossible, with [72]

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the whole sequence now present in our mind's eye, not to contemplate it as living drama. The poet, as no one can forget, has introduced the Monk as robust, hearty, exuding physical well-being; fond of the good things of this world, fine clothes, rich food; no lover of his study but, on the contrary, passionately devoted to the delights of the chase, with a stable of well-conditioned hunters and a pack of superior hounds. For suggestion that he was also tolerant of other physical pleasures, the bells on his bridle made music (quite as loud and clear, Chaucer mischievously suggests, as the chapel bell of the sound of which his more pressing engagements too often deprived him); and he wore at the throat a conspicuous gold pin wrought into an ingenious love-knot. He had already opened his latitudinarian views to the poet in what he said on their first meeting, as well as by his appearance. But since that night two things had happened to make him selfconscious. The first was the Shipman's Tale, which described the merry life of another monk, likewise an "outrider" in vigorous early middle age, courteous and well-mannered, and knowledgeable in the art of planting gifts where they would grow and blossom to his advantage. Latent comparisons were almost inevitable. But the Host is not content to leave them unexpressed. With embarrassing bluntness he goes straight to the point, congratulating the Monk upon his excellent physique and general air of sufficiency: "It is a gentil pasture ther thow goost." The Monk can be no poor cloisterer, he must surely be a master, a wily and wise governor, And therwithal of brawnes and of bones, A wel farynge persone for the nones. I pray to God, yeve hym confusioun That first thee broghte unto religioun! (VII, 1941-1944)

And so on at length: the trouble with the world today is that [73]

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all the likeliest men are prohibited from marriage, like this Churchman here, and only the "shrimps" are left to perpetutate the race. Then, still more pointedly: This maketh that oure wyves wole assaye Religious folk, for ye mowe bettre paye Of Venus paiementz than mowe we; God woot, no lussheburghes payen y el (VII, 1959-1962)

The Monk cannot possibly let this broadside go unmet. The Host's unabashed if good-natured cynicism has impugned his vocation: as a dignitary of the Church he must reassert the respect due her. Even in his own person he cannot submit to be the butt of such vulgar jesting: he has a higher notion of his value to society. It is up to him now to substitute a dignified likeness for the base image that has been foisted upon him so gratuitously. The self-control which he evinces at this crisis goes far to justify his obvious professional success. Such good judgment and self-mastery demonstrate genuine character. He has formerly served his novitiate (however distasteful) in study, and now reaches back for such evidences of learning as he can lay hands on in face of this sudden challenge. His memory is something of a lumber-room, and things are not in such good order nor so accessible as he could wish. At first, he gropes a little uncertainly: "I will try, avoiding impropriety, to tell you a story or two, or three. If you like, I'll tell you the life of Saint Edward; or first, I'll give you some tragedies. I have scores of these to pore over in my cell but I may not be able to call them to mind in due chronological sequence. So please excuse it if I tell them some before and some behind, as recollection serves." His knowledge is dusty, but it covers a surprising range. The effect on the rest of the company is well remembered; but the Monk has gained his object and has recovered his dignity. After the Host, in [74]

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exasperation, has demanded a hunting story, the Monk says frostily, "Nay, . . . I have no lust to pleye. Now lat another telle, as I have toold." (VII, 2806-2807)

Thereafter, he is not annoyed by any further ribald jesting at his expense. As to weakness with women, has he not shown that Fortune, herself a woman, chooses women as the chief agents of her mischief? None of the pilgrims, except Chaucer, appears able to savour the delicious irony of this scene. Here is a man who by instinct and by habit shuns his cell and turns wholeheartedly towards the full enjoyment of sensuous living. Here he is—fur at his cuffs, boots well greased and supple, horse in fine fettle—solemnly and purposefully teaching contempt of the world—with the bells on his bridle cheerily belying his every word. But he is not a hypocrite. This sobriety and weight is an essential element in the Monk's idea of himself, and constitutes, all in all, a truer picture than the indecent travesty of the popular conception. Rusty his learning may be, but it is none the less his, and comes up from within, from hiding-places ten years deep. "Tragedies are an ancient literary form . . . [he says]. They are usually versified in a metre of six feet, called hexameter—and many of them also are written in prose—and also in metre of various kinds. That ought to be enough to give you the idea!" "Popes, Emperors, and Kings" have been promised, and he leads off with examples "true and old" from Holy Writ; but Hercules and his load come to mind and other classical instances follow; and, at need, Dante, Petrarch, and even contemporary events are laid under contribution. He never does bethink him of a Pope; but, nevertheless, for range of allusion, only the Nun's Priest among the clergy makes a better showing. Doubtless, however, the Monk is relieved to be stopped. Whether the Knight's reaction re[75]

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fleeted the general opinion is doubtful. The Knight is something of a sentimentalist, and likes a happy ending. But the religious folk loved a good martyrdom, and would have been tolerant of the tragedies. Moreover, the company had already swallowed the Melibeus without complaining and would later take the Parson's sermon with equal docility. One would think the Monk's Tale almost sprightly, compared to these. But of course his effort, coming on the heels of the Melibeus—which is more than twice as long—stands the brunt, inevitably, of an accumulated impatience in the breast of Harry Bailey, who had not had the nerve to stop the same man twice in succession. Bailey, we recall, is as boisterous as a boy just released from the school-room when Chaucer finishes Melibeus. To be sure, he wishes his wife had heard this tale, since at least it might have done her good. But let's change the subject, he cries: "Lat us passe awey fro this mateere!"—from Prudence and Godelief and all other wives that wear the breeches. Let's hear something to cheer us up. And he turns to the Monk, with confident expectation of "desport and game," only to be dashed with another load of depressing doctrine—and by a muscular Nimrod with bells on his bridle! One couldn't even doze for the clinking of those wretched bells! . . . there could have been few more delectable moments in the whole drama of the pilgrimage for one who loved as Chaucer did to observe the ironic crosslights of social interchange. Bare of dramatic context, the De Casibus kind of narrative is not perhaps very exhilarating. But when presented as told against the grain of a particular company, by an ecclesiast who is himself at odds with his own performance, though determined to prove the contrary, the simple substance is lifted to a level of complex comic vision that can hardly be matched in its kind until the arrival of Sterne, who was only to make explicit what Chaucer observed but left others to congratulate themselves on having discovered!

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It does not always happen that Chaucer's delineation and management of his transcripts from waking life achieve a solution so felicitous as in the case of the Monk. On the natural level, the kindred questions of consistency and psychological realism sometimes rise in an acute form. They are answerable for a considerable body of critical disquisition, particularly during the last half-century, and for no mean amount of subtle and ingenious analysis of character and motivation. The line between subjective and objective, between legitimate and illegitimate inference, has from time to time to be very subtly drawn. How much of this kind of effort is justified will perhaps never be determined by historico-critical principles, and even the best of it must remain subject to individual judgment in a particular case. Was it often of much concern to Chaucer to extend the portraits of his fellow-pilgrims by means of the stories he gave them? Have we the right to suppose that, beyond an obvious suitability, he would attempt to suggest unrevealed facets of their inner or even unconscious beings in this way? The Millere is a cherl, ye knowe wel this; So was the Revé, and othere manye mo, And harlotrie they tolden bothe two. (I, 3182-3184)

So much is beyond dispute. But are we justified in following Kittredge's lead, to maintain with him that "the Pilgrims do not exist for the sake of the stories, but vice versa. Structurally regarded, the stories are merely long speeches expressing, directly or indirectly, the characters of the several persons"?3 On historical grounds, it seems more than doubtful. And are we entitled to extend and particularize the principle so as to agree with Kittredge that, for example, "Nowhere is the poignant trait of thwarted motherhood so affecting as in this character of the Prioress"?4 "A single life doth well with churchmen," Bacon has told us, "for G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 1915, p. 155. *Ibid., p. 178. 3

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charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool." What then? Is the churchman's charity invariably to be set down to the frustrations of the unmarried? Why "the poignant trait of thwarted motherhood"? Is it not psychologically possible—nay, probable—that for her the Prioress's way of life was anything but painful—was not rather a fulfilment, a generous release, of her maternal impulses, such as they might have been? And can we assume that Chaucer chose this story in order to develop a hypothesis about the Prioress's unconscious psychic needs or desires? To ask the question is not to impugn Chaucer's judgment in assigning the tale to its teller. Appropriate we must all feel it to be, for more reasons than one—not the least perhaps being the overt streak of cruelty masked as pious hatred which is the visible obverse of the rather shallow sensibility that marks this nun's temperament. But she could have cited all too ample sanctions for her anti-Semitism; and neither have we here licence to infer an intention on Chaucer's part to trace the anfractuosities of a psyche. Similarly, in discussing the fitness of other tales to their tellers, we must be chary of deducing the poet's purpose from a modern effect that looms large because of contemporary preoccupations. There is testimony to the depth of Chaucer's reading of human nature when we find it not inconsistent with our latest "discoveries"; but the demonstration of such truths need not have formed any part of his deliberate intention. Thus, today, the Wife of Bath's Tale seems patently the satisfying in fantasy of her longing to recapture youth and beauty; but we can hardly assume that Chaucer set out to demonstrate the mechanism of wishfulfilment. The Marchen had a foregone conclusion as it came to him; and it was doubtless sufficient that it perfectly exemplified the Wife's thesis that husbands should yield sovereignty to their wives. And what, we may ask, without other clues than those provided, are we supposed to infer [78]

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about the tellers' character from the Man of Law's, the Physician's, or the Manciple's tales? We are perhaps goaded to excogitate a theory only because the stories seem at first reading so unsuitable. It might be charged that the Monk was in the same case, unless we are willing to grant that the explicit context sufficiently justified our claim that the comical inappropriateness is contributory to a deeper propriety. For here, as we have seen, outward circumstances already divulged, rather than an anachronistic hypothesis, prompted the explanation put forward. Even more insidiously provocative are the self-disclosures of some other pilgrims. Notorious among these is of course the Pardoner, and of all the explanations of his "cynical avowal" Kittredge's stands pre-eminent for eloquence and subtlety. By virtue of the anticipatory protests of the gentlefolk lest the Pardoner tell of "ribaudye," the self-revelation, thinks Kittredge, becomes dramatically inevitable. "He is simply forestalling the reflections of his fellow-pilgrims. 'I know I am a rascal,' he says in effect, 'and you know it; and I wish to show you that I know you know i t ' . . . this time no deception is possible, and he scorns the role of a futile hypocrite."5 Repeating a sermon to show his skill, he is carried by the momentum of his routine past the point where he ought in the present circumstances to have stopped, and adds the exhortation to take advantage of his relics and his absolution. Under the spell of his own eloquence, Kittredge believes, he is seized with a "paroxysm of agonized sincerity" that immediately gives way to wild mockery. The moment of paroxysm is signalized by three and a half lines that break—or seem to break—the tenor of discourse: And lo, sires, thus I prêche. And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soûles leche, So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve. (VI, 915-918) 5//>zY/., p. 214.

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Here, says Kittredge, "suddenly, unexpectedly, without an instant's warning, his cynicism falls away"; but he recovers at once, and goes on with his cynical invitation to the pilgrims themselves to make offering to the relics he has just exposed as frauds. More recently, Professor G. H. Gerould—throwing off en passant the delectable conjecture that the ale-stake at which the Pardoner paused for drink and a bite of bread was none other than his boon companion the Summoner, bearing in front of him his "edible buckler" and crowned with a garland "as great as it were for an ale-stake"— proceeds to interpret the whole performance of the Pardoner as that of a man who was drunk to the point of reckless garrulity. "Swept along on the tide of his own drunken eloquence . . . it is hard to say to what extent the Pardoner is conscious of what he is doing. Between ale and histrionism he is almost a somnambulist."6 Pursuing this idea of inebriation, Gerould traces the spoor with assured skill through all the windings and rambling indirections of the Pardoner's discourse to the point where the "moral tale" truly begins, with the entrance of the three rioters on the scene. "Drink," he writes, "has not only loosened his tongue . . . but it has thoroughly befuddled him" and on this foundation his selfincrimination can be understood. But when he reached the tale, according to Gerould, Chaucer "sacrificed dramatic propriety" by taking over, himself, "as is wholly right." The tale displays all the restraint, precision, and inexorable movement that the "scrambled tirade" preceding it so conspicuously lacked. At the end, Chaucer hands back the reins to the Pardoner, who finishes with a burst of cynical and impudent effrontery, but carrying "one white spot on his cloak of infamy," that moment of sincerity which we must accept because it was given him by his creator, who meant him to be a human being, not a devil. Both these theories are persuasively argued and have no 6G. H. Gerould, Chaucerian Essays, 1952, p. 62.

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small degree of dramatic appeal. Both, we should observe, rest on an assumed intention—of psychological realism— which is neither argued nor even called into question. It must be said that to make this assumption is to take for granted in Chaucer an orientation and a technical achievement that we are probably wrong in expecting before the eighteenth century, at the earliest. The episode invites our closer attention. Let us approach it this time from the rear. After the Pardoner has completed his story, he addresses the pilgrims about him, urging them to offer good money for his absolution. "I forgot to say," he declares, "that my relics are as fine as any man's in the country, and that my pardon conies straight from the Pope's own hand. I invite any one who is moved by a spirit of devotion to come forward, kneel down, and receive absolution. Or, for a price, you can have it as you go, at frequent intervals, because one never knows what may happen, and one or other of you might fall off his horse and break his neck. You are really very lucky to have me along to assoil you in case of emergency." Thus far, apart from his insensitive jocularity, the Pardoner might be doing business much as usual. But when he turns to the Host, we see that he is making a joke that he expects all the pilgrims to enjoy! I rede that oure Hoost heere shal bigynne, For he is moost envoluped in synne. Com forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon, And thou shalt kisse the relikes everychon, Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purs. (VI, 941-945)

In the Pardoner's hierarchy of offenders, the worst sinner was he that kept the tightest hold on his purse-strings. Avarice was the root of all evil and the target of all the Pardoner's sermonizing; and he knew that no one could be unaware of Bailey's ruling passion. "I have an idea," Bailey had announced on the first night, "that won't cost you a thing. The one of you who tells the best stories on the way to Canterbury and back shall be given a free supper at the

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expense of all the rest, in this very room. And I'll even go along at my own charge, to make you the merrier and to see that you get back all right. And if any one resists my decisions, he'll have to pay scot and lot along the way." These conditions are reiterated the following morning. The point of character was clear to all of them. And in the same connection, it is unlikely that Bailey himself missed the barb aimed in his direction by the Pardoner during his mocksermon, when the latter went out of his role to warn his imaginary country congregation against adulterated wines. "In certain places," he hints, "you order a good French wine, and when you drink it you find yourself transported to Spain." Now, Fish St. and Cheapside, as all the Pilgrims of course knew, lie just at the other end of London Bridge from where the Tabard Inn stood; and in view of this fact the reference to "othere wynes growynge faste by" is surely sufficiently pointed (VI, 566). Of course, the wine consumed on Harry Bailey's premises was a chief source of revenue to him, and to mix the cheap and cruder Spanish with the superior French was the next way to augment his profits. Few Londoners would be better informed about such doings than an experienced customs officer, which the poet happened to be. In any case, who needed to be reminded that Innkeeper was a synonym for an itching palm? The Pardoner feels it a safe jibe to offer Bailey a bargain-price for his pardon: to name any sum above a groat would frighten him and defeat the man's chance of salvation. The Host's retort is indeed devastating; but I think we mistake if we attribute its grossness to violent anger. He could take the time-honoured taunt and repay it with interest. A notable thing is that he does not impugn the Pardoner's relics, but instead stigmatizes the man himself as a living lie. His contempt, not rage, is what renders the Pardoner speechless. Now, we know that Bailey's estimate of the Pardoner is approximately correct because the Pardoner himself, in his [82]

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prologue, has supplied the evidence. But, for exploratory purposes, let us suppose a stage of composition when the Pardoner's prologue did not exist. Suppose Chaucer first wrote the sermon and the tale, and stopped with the prayer quoted already, that Christ grant his own pardon to the pilgrims. This would have made an effective and appropriate conclusion, and, whatever the Pardoner's private reservations, no hypothesis would be required to explain the data in hand. Fifteen lines earlier, the Pardoner in his peroration had exclaimed: Alias! mankynde, how may it bitide That to thy creatour, which that the wroghte, And with his precious herte-blood thee boghte, Thou art so fais and so unkynde, alias? (VI, 900-903)

Without the prologue—which we are imagining away—the note of genuine piety would be heard in these lines. With the prologue, and remembering that the Pardoner's object is to get money, we may still recall that his ability to cause others to repent is something upon which he greatly values himself; and we may grant that he might hope that in the final reckoning the good so accomplished would be allowed to count however faintly in his behalf. For, although a hypocrite and a rascal, he is not an apostate. The note of sincerity in this speech is not necessarily cancelled by his vicious life. And, by the same token, he might well the more consider that true repentance would be acceptable in Heaven's eye, whether the relics that were the agent of it were false or genuine. It required no revulsion to elicit the admission that Christ's pardon was surer than his own; and might he not moreover be the unworthy instrument of such an act of grace? Was it really inconsistent of him to say: Myn hooly pardone may yow allé warice.... I yow assoille, by myn heigh power.... And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soûles leche, So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve. (VI, 906-918)

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Or, supposing he wished people to believe the first two statements while disbelieving or discounting them himself, why should he hesitate to add the prayer and the final assurance? Under the supposition that Chaucer had originally ended here, having composed neither prologue nor epilogue, what would have been the effect of the tale over-all? Simply, that of a straight "moral tale"; with homiletic digressions against gluttony, gambling, and swearing; devoid of ironic crosslighting, and marvellously impressive. But, if the charge of humbug contained in the General Prologue were to be borne out, Chaucer could see that something further must be done. Let us suppose that he thereupon added the present conclusion. This, to be sure, is vividly effective; but it does not fundamentally alter the picture. It adds touches of humour to the character; it lets us know what Bailey thought of him; but it leaves the rest as before. What alternatives, then, were open to the poet if he wished to reveal unmistakably a deeper perfidy in the Pardoner? Obviously, the hypocrite would have to be exposed either by others or by himself. If by others, there would have to be a good deal of dramatic action, within a narrative frame—as later exemplified in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale; and this would be cumbrous and unwieldy. Or else the procedure would have to be by charge and countercharge, as in the Friar-Summoner quarrel, where it is a case of name-calling, with nothing much settled either way. But if the give-away was to be by the Pardoner himself, it would have to be brought about either, again, in dramatic action or by the device of confession. The first of these latter alternatives could hardly be managed economically, without considerable editorial interposition. But the device of confession was dramatic, immediate, and readily available. It was adumbrated in the religious practice of every believer, and anchored securely in old literary conventions that would [84]

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maintain their vitality down through Elizabethan tragedy and, with gradual transformation, far beyond. Without it, Dante himself could have made no headway; and Richard III and Macbeth would be inexplicable. For, of course, soliloquy is but the pretence of a concession to realism—as is likewise its modern extension, that written soliloquy set down as the "stream of consciousness." The confessional device, in fact, leapt to Chaucer's hand when he wished to reveal the naked inwardness of character, as the Reeve, the Wife, the Merchant, and the Pardoner all show; and neither he nor his contemporaries were aware of the fetters that we retrospectively try to fasten upon them. Here, then, he was uninhibited in resorting to a means of exposition so fully sanctioned; and the Pardoner, in consequence, is equally uninhibited in his boastful self-denunciation: Thus spitte I out my venym under hewe Of hoolynesse, to semen hooly and trewe. (VI, 421-422)

Chaucer, we may continue to suppose, wrote the confession last, and the Pardoner's infamy was now fully displayed. But what, probably, had hardly been foreseen was the effect of this on all that followed. For now the preaching seems a continual and monstrous mockery, rising to blasphemy whenever the name of Christ is uttered. This is an irony too profound for humanity, and we simply recoil from belief in its possibility. We cannot credit the Pardoner's total repudiation of the meaning to which he has given such sensitive and moving expression. The combination is inconceivable. We are sure his imagination and his morality are both enlisted on the side of good. When he calls the rioters cursed men, when he says of one of them, And atte laste the feend, oure enemy, Putte in his thought that he sholde poyson beye, With which he myghte sleen his felawes tweye. (VI, 844-846),

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we know he is not mocking. And when, therefore, he prays that his present auditory may receive Christ's pardon, all of us believe that the wish is sincere and devoid of irony. But when the Pardoner goes on to advertise his wares to the same company, we experience a rude shock. We seem to have been jolted out of our moral assurance. We have heard all this before in a context that made sense. Now it is as if a phonograph needle had been jarred suddenly back into an earlier groove, and the sense is ruptured. How can he possibly be saying to the people before whom he has just uncovered his frauds: But, sires, o word forgat I in my tale: I have relikes and pardoun in my male. . . . If any of yow wole, of devoción, Offren, and han myn absolución, Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun, And mekely receyveth my pardoun. (VI, 919-926)

So gross an affront to the meanest intelligence among the pilgrims is simply unimaginable. Certainly, it gives no comfort to those critics who think the Pardoner intelligent. Why may not the answer to the puzzle lie in the conditions of composition? The tale, surely, was written first, and like almost every other finished piece in the whole work, it was originally rounded off with a pious sentiment: And lo, sires, thus I prêche. And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soûles leche, So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve. (VI, 915-918)

It was entirely acceptable as the sort of performance the Pardoner might be expected to offer. Then Chaucer, we may suppose, wrote the headlink—not the prologue—and the conclusion, which framed the sermon in a vividly dramatic context, but without distorting the tale. Offering the relics and absolution was in character, as was the half-banter of the self-advertisement that accompanied the offer. There [86]

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was no psychological break, for the Pardoner was yet strictly accurate in saying that he had hitherto omitted to speak of his relics and pardons. His references to them had been addressed to an imaginary audience of humble folk, good men and wives: "And lo, sires, thus I prêche." But then the poet, feeling perhaps that the tale came in awkwardly or too abruptly after the headlink with its indicated pause for refreshment, or sensing that the Pardoner's character was deserving of much fuller treatment; and wishing moreover to lengthen this block of narrative to the customary hour to hour-and-a-quarter's reading-time (for all Chaucer's writing is demonstrably conditioned by this simple and primary rule of oral delivery) wrote the Pardoner's confession, and at a stroke created a series of problems which have strained the best abilities of several generations of critics suckled on psychological realism. The ensuing game has been very exciting; but one surmises that the character that has been constructed of the "famous pulpit orator," so intellectual, so subtle, so racked with psychic turmoil, so pathetic, so sinister, would have astounded its original creator, and must be largely discounted as a modern instance. It is the poet's own fault, this time; but in any event, we have seen again (as in the Monk's Tale) how surprising and unexpected may be the results of altering one of the constituents of a cluster that combines conventional with naturalistic effects. Yet, again, there is elsewhere in Chaucer's work a different, a new kind of verisimilitude that seems absolutely to overleap the centuries and with startling clarity to bring us into the actual presence of that society—or, conversely, to bring those people into ours. The best examples of it are to be seen in the Troilus and Criseyde, in the scenes between Pandarus and Criseyde at her house, and the dinner party at the house of Deiphebus. In these scenes there is absolutely no barrier of distance between us, and we are simply [87]

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reduced to helpless amazement at their immediacy. There is, I think, nothing else in mediaeval literature that approaches the natural human reality of that world. After reading the conclusion of Book II we know that we have been, with Chaucer, at a meal in a royal household, as he must often have been, and that we have enjoyed the perfect comfort and ease and good manners of that company, listening happily to the flow of talk as it wound its eddying, playful course over the flats and particoloured pebbles, among the glancing lights and shadows, of spontaneous associations and common interests. Gret honour did hem Deiphebus, certeyn, And fedde hem wel with al that myghte like; But evere mo "Alias!" was his refreyn, "My goode brother Troilus, the syke, Lith yet"—and therwithal he gan to sike; And after that, he peyned hym to glade Hem as he myghte, and cheere good he made. Compleyned ek Eleyne of his siknesse So feythfully, that pite was to here, And every wight gan waxen for accesse A leche anón, and seyde, "In this manere Men curen folk."—"This charme I wol yow leeré." But ther sat oon, al list hire nought to teche, That thoughte, "Best koud I yet ben his leche." After compleynte, hym gonnen they to preyse, As folk don yet, whan som wight hath bygonne To preise a man, and up with pris hym reise A thousand fold yet heigher than the sonne: "He is, he kan, that fewe lordes konne." And Pandarus, of that they wolde afferme, He naught forgat hire preisynge to conferme. . .. The tyme com, fro dyner for to ryse, And as hem aughte, arisen everichon. And gonne a while of this and that devise. But Pandarus brak al this speche anon, And seide to Deiphebus, "Wol ye gon, If it youre wille be, as I yow preyde, To speke here of the nedes of Criseyde?" [88]

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Eleyne, which that by the hond hire held, Took first the tale, and seyde, "Go we blyve"; And goodly on Criseyde she biheld, And seyde, "Joves lat hym nevere thryve, That doth yow harm, and brynge hym soone of lyve, And yeve me sorwe, but he shal it rewe, If that I may, and allé folk be trewe!" "Telle thow thi neces cas," quod Deiphebus To Pandarus, "for thow kanst best it telle." "My lordes and my ladys, it stant thus: What sholde I lenger," quod he, "do yow dwelle?" He rong hem out a procès lik a belle Upon hire foo, that highte Poliphete, So heynous, that men myghte on it spete.... Spak than Eleyne, and seyde, "Pandarus, Woot ought my lord, my brother, this matere, I meene Ector? or woot it Troilus?" He seyde, "Ye, but wole ye now me here? Me thynketh this, sith that Troilus is here, It were good, if that ye wolde assente, She tolde hireself hym al this, er she wente." (II, 1569-1631)

For such a scene as this to recur in our annals, we have to wait another four hundred years, until Boswell tricked Johnson into going to the Dillys', to a dinner with John Wilkes: [At] the cheering sound of "Dinner is upon the table," . . . we all sat down without any symptom of ill humour. . . . Mr. Wilkes placed himself next to Dr. Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness, that he gained upon him insensibly. . . . "Pray give me leave, Sir:— It is better here—A little of the brown—Some fat, Sir—A little of the stuffing—Some gravy—Let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter—Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange;— or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest."—"Sir, Sir, I am obliged to you, Sir," cried Johnson, bowing, and turning his head to him with a look for some time of "surly virtue," but, in a short while, of complacency.7

Do we not find, in both these scenes, the same illusion of 7

James Boswell, Life of Johnson, sub Wednesday, May 15, 1776.

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truthful immediacy, the same seizing of the reporter's right to select, to focus, to summarize actual sense-data, the same awareness of concealed personal tensions beneath the limpid surface? And does not the later scene strengthen our conviction that Chaucer was not so much inventing as re-living his memories?

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4. BY CANDLELIGHT OUR UNDERLYING, if not always insistent, concern has been with the different kinds or levels of experience of which Chaucer makes varying report, passing to and fro at will, from the modes of allegory to natural observation and to hearsay or written testimony, from one plane of reality to another; and with the contrasts and clashes which may develop from their intermingling. The realm of experience at second hand, of books and hearsay, is now to be our centre of attention. We shall look at some of the uses of story, and at some of its problems, and at the degree of importance that attaches to it, in Chaucer's picture of life. Obviously, the world of books is hospitably inclusive, and accommodates many states of being. In this world, Chaucer's tendency, with infrequent exceptions, is seemingly to accept what he finds, with more than a willing suspension of disbelief. He seldom brings story, or history, to the bar of a sceptical examination as to matter-of-fact probabilities, or allows his private doubts to appear in his report. Once in a great while, where nothing very vital depends on the point, he may take the liberty of expressing a reservation, as thus in The Legend of Good Women: [91]

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I can nat seyn if that it be possible, But Venus hadde hym maked invysible— Thus seyth the bok. (1020-1022)

For the most part, on the contrary, Chaucer not ironically but quite humbly sets vast store, as no doubt did most of his contemporaries, on the weight of ancient authority, and makes a great allowance, in hard matters, for the probable difference between the here-and-now and the far-away-andlong-ago. In fact, he rather welcomes such likelihood—and why not? The people of the Middle Ages readily acknowledged that they lived in a world of wonders; and they were far less prone than later generations to forget that what they did not know was incalculably more than what they thought they knew. The things preserved in books were obviously things that former ages had considered worthy of remembrance: why else record them? We should take Chaucer's professions in the opening of the Prologue to the Legend as a perfectly sincere expression of his orthodoxy in this regard: God forbede but men shulde leve Wei more thing then men han seen with ye! Men shal not wenen every thing a lye But yf himself yt seeth, or elles dooth. . .. Than mote we to bokes that we fynde, Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde,. . . Yeve credence, in every skylful wise... . And yf that olde bokes were aweye, Yloren were of remembraunce the keye. Wei ought us thanne honouren and beleve These bokes, there we han noon other prevé. And as for me,. .. to hem yive I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence. . . . (F, 10-32)

It is all too easy for a modern reader, taught in the interests of mere self-preservation to disbelieve 99 per cent of the incessant spate of print, to take these words of Chaucer's, too, in a modern spirit, discounting as if they meant, "In

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general, I enjoy and respect the books that have come down to us from the past, and in particular I believe just so much as appeals to my reason and experience." We can hardly help feeling that that is what so rational a man as Chaucer ought to have meant; but it is unlikely that he did so. For, in his day, those books were more especially to be valued of which the contents lay mostly outside or beyond the stretch of easy verification, whether in space or time. Consequently, the most precious books were likely to be the oldest books. Just as Nestor, oldest among the living, was by virtue of his reach of memory revered as the wisest man, so a book that had survived for centuries stood, with the force of ocular proof, as the physical witness—the residual actuality—of ancient life, speaking with an authority not subject to challenge by modern experience. Subtly, moreover, some of the wisdom of later generations had meanwhile accrued to it like a kind of patina, lending the sanction of testimonial responses now inseparable and essential. As Johnson was later to rationalize this contribution, with a classical emphasis on the community, though not the wonder, of human experience: "The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood."1 Understood or not, the decent attitude towards "thise olde wyse" is, in Chaucer's view, whether the record be strange or no, one of reverent acceptance of their "olde appreved stories"—appreved, confirmed, not by demonstrative evidence but by sufficient testimony—let them tell what they will, be it of saints' lives (holynesse), secular annals (règnes), military history (victories), or human relations (of Preface to Shakespeare, fourth paragraph.

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love, of hate, of other sondry thynges) (Legend of Good Women, F, 21-23). From this attitude of reverence it follows that the primary obligation of him who retells is not to "falsen hir mateere" but to give a faithful report. Especially would this duty be paramount in the case of supernatural visions, which may be inestimably full of significance, though so often obscure. Let no man trifle with ancient bodements. But when Chaucer came to transfer to his own pages the human figures that he had encountered in the course of his wide reading, he found himself engaged with a number of artistic problems not always clearly foreseen, and by no means always welcome. In a new context, such figures raised questions of scale, and questions of compatibility on aesthetic grounds, often with arresting insistence; and it cannot always be claimed that Chaucer was successful in solving these difficulties. To follow his efforts and try to see how and why he succeeded or failed in certain crucial cases may give us a fuller insight into the quality of his art. In this connection, it is worth recalling that Tatlock once roundly declared: "The stories [in the Monk's Tale] are too brief to be interesting, and he was never good at vitalizing material derived from ancient sources."2 But let us commence by inquiring what it was about the Legends of Good Women that discouraged him from completing them. Scale in the Legend is an important consideration, as we shall soon see. Chaucer's ballade, in the Prologue, mentioning nineteen ladies, was picked up by the God of Love as suggesting a basic outline for the long task imposed on the poet. Most of the ladies named belonged to the realm of classical fable. In pursuance of a homogeneity of tone, Chaucer seems to have shied from his two figures outside the classical tradition, Esther from sacred history, and Iseult 2 J. S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works, 1907, p. 166.

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from the newer world—though, in the face of his failure to finish, and the conflicting list in the Man of Law's Prologue, we can only hazard the guess. Esther, at any rate, would have made an anomalous member of the canon. In an important sense, all the women in the Legend are also personifications. They owe their presence in the catalogue to one fact alone, that they were martyrs to love. What they have in common is therefore more significant than all their points of difference, for purposes of the poem, whose theme is yet and evermore shall be: Radix fidelitatis feminae.

That Chaucer recognizes this truth is clear from the slightness of the characterization he allows to his heroines. They all act in a manner befitting the role assigned, and speak to the single point of uttermost loyalty, or of uttermost despair at desertion. The quality of their emotional experience is not differentiated, nor is it intended to be. Even the Dido of The House of Fame is more individualized than is the Dido of the Legend, though her story in the latter is a hundred lines longer than that of any of her sisters. Whatever generalizations arise from these narratives, apart from the simple moral, belong to the poet; and all the diversity lies in his incidental description. There are signs that from the beginning he had doubts of the wisdom of so very extensive a demonstration, repeated time after time, of the same Q.E.D. His nervousness about this prompts the parting advice of the God of Love, in version F of the Prologue (lines 570-577), and he puts his doubts in his own way in the very first legend: The weddynge and the feste to devyse, To me, that have ytake swich empryse Of so many a story for to make, It were to longe, lest that I shulde slake Of thyng that bereth more effect and charge; For men may overlade a ship or barge

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[shadows of the Custom House!]. And forthy to th'effect thanne wol I skyppe, And al the remenaunt, I wol lete it slippe. (616-623)

Often in the succeeding stories he adverts, good-humouredly, to the need for haste: in fact, only in the perfectly proportioned Thisbe legend and in the unfinished Hypermnestra does he omit to do so. The Dido, being the longest, contains four such allusions, notably: I coude folwe, word for word, Virgile, But it wolde lasten al to longe while. (1002-1003)

But perhaps the clearest indication of strain is in the Phillis, where the poet declares: But, for I am agroted herebyforn To wryte of hem that ben in love forsworn, And ek to haste me in my légende, (Which to performe God me grace sende!) Therfore I passe shortly in this wyse; (2454-2558)

and then refers us back to Theseus' betrayal of Ariadne! Like father, like son, he tells us: Demophon meted out the same treatment to Phillis: Me lyste nat vouche-sauf on hym to swynke, Ne spende on hym a penne ful of ynke, For fais in love was he, ryght as his syre. The devil sette here soules bothe afyre! ( 2490-2493 )

Chaucer's characteristic anxiety not to be a bore has been recognized as the habit of a man practised in oral composition and aware of the uncertain attention of a present audience. But in these tales, we seem to detect a special urgency, an impatience to get to the end of an interminable assignment. Having, as we believe, lately demonstrated in the Troilus and Criseyde his supreme ability to recreate the dynamic complexities of emotional relations, Chaucer may have anticipated with relief a routine literary task. Instead, this one

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proved frustrating. There was a radical conflict for him between means and matter: the prescribed scope indicated brevity as an essential condition, the prescribed theme demanded expansion. The poet who could create Troilus knew all too thoroughly the innermost reality of longing, in man or woman. But that emotion could not be struck off in a series of symbolic figures, minted like a set of coins of designated value, or flat personifications all standing for the same quality. To treat it so was to reduce whatever truth there was in the thesis to the heartless unreality of a pantomime. And there was truth in it; and not to depict it as true was to make a mock of human misery. Pondering the problem, Chaucer might reflect that the more successfully he overcame the inherent difficulties and managed to suggest the poignancy of true love in his cameos, the more intolerable the work would ultimately become in its unrelieved gloom. There was no provision for interludes of any kind: it would be a tragic frieze. "What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" Could any one honestly endure to see it, or hear it, through? Why collect and distil records of human suffering merely to enforce the single point that men were deceivers ever and that women could be faithful? Much better to show the variety of ways in which people might come to grief on this slippery planet at the hands of Fortune. Works like Boccaccio's De Casibus taught a profound and universal lesson, more useful to mankind and a good deal less monotonous on the same scale of elaboration. And this consideration brings us back abruptly to the analogous case of the Monk's Tale. When Chaucer came to work up the materials of the Monk's Tale, whatever the date of its composition, he had at least a wider field in which to expatiate. He could draw his materials from either sex, from every kind of temperament, cruel or generous, noble or infamous, and from every time and clime. The more he diversified the exhibition, the

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more he enforced the moral lesson. Thus, what was constricting in the other plan (an over-ruling thesis) was liberating in the present one; because in the other case the principle arose from within the character, and now it imposed itself from without. Moreover, now the examples could be as brief or as elaborate as one chose, because the demonstration did not depend for its effect on development of character. Every one knew the story of Adam: thereof needed no "long sermoun." It could be dispatched in a stanza. But Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, was relatively unfamiliar, and was certainly good for sixteen. All would have been fee simple to the poet in this project, had not a new and irresistible temptation, the implanting it in the Canterbury frame, entered Chaucer's adventurous imagination and instantly, as we have already seen, blown the rational plan and its conventional adjustments sky-high. Nevertheless, looking back we can see that from the beginning a series of poetical exempla such as comprise the substance of the Monk's Tale would in Chaucer's artistic practice require some kind of frame or motivating scheme. It seems very unlikely that he would have begun such a compilation as this without devising a plausible means of getting it under way, some kind of machinery to start the procession of the unfortunate on its lamentable march. For we can scarcely believe that Chaucer amused himself at odd moments by writing separate thumb-nail sketches of unlucky careers, without any ulterior purpose, to find at last on looking through his papers that he had enough, arranged alphabetically or chronologically, to make a little DTB, or Dictionary of Tragic Biography. And even if the work had begun in this mechanical fashion, Chaucer would still, we must suppose, have proceeded to invent a prologue or induction to give it artistic justification. This consideration might have incidental bearing on the question whether the Monk's Tale is relatively early work. But there can be no [98]

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doubt that the kind of frame which would first have suggested itself to Chaucer for such pieces, since frame there must be, would have been that of the dream-vision. The vision framework, in fact, was already before him in his working model, Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. To be transported in dream to the dwelling-place of the goddess Fortuna, to observe her "wilfulhed," and thereby to be prompted to recount what befell some of her subjects, would have been standard procedure for the author of The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women. The underlying parallel between the Monk's Tale and the Legend is thus seen to be surprisingly close. As in the Legend, the characters in the Tale exist mainly as variations on a theme. They are but symbols of catastrophe, as the former were of fidelity. With an analogous prologue, these pieces would be seen as two attempts to solve the same artistic problem: to work out some sort of dynamics between the world of books and the world of dreams, so that the figures of each sphere may play their characteristic roles. How much of full-bodied reality, or natural verisimilitude, can be juxtaposed with how much fantasy? How much flattening and simplification of historical or legendary lives can still carry imaginative conviction? What are the means by which one can pass smoothly from one plane of reality to another, from timeless dream to recorded past and vice versa? But with the shift of frame to contemporary reality, the problem suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, is thrown into an entirely new perspective. These tragic simulacra, drawn, most of them, from "olde bokes," are small from their great distance from us in time and place. Since "a dream itself is but a shadow," they might have passed with little shock to the senses in the old context. But against the three-dimensional immediacy of the Monk and the Host, as Chaucer has now chosen to present them, they raise an

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instinctive protest. For most of us now they have no purchase on the imagination, and are next to unendurable. In the new setting, they shrink to nothing in themselves, and the Knight is obliged to close the book of them. But, as we have seen, the focus of our vision is no longer upon them but in the living present. Like the Pardoner's relics, they acquire extrinsic value from their owner's purposes and use of them. Their unendurability—not being allowed to run its course to the bitter end—fortunately becomes an essential ingredient in this olla podrida of humours. This is to be sure one way of meeting the difficulty, and a very brilliant one. But it is rather a tour de force than a genuine solution. It has, nevertheless, undeniably provided spectacular demonstration that to change one factor in a complex of this sort is to alter the significance of each of the other parts, as well as the total configuration. The latent friction between what may be called twodimensional and three-dimensional representation—or, generally speaking, the procedures of allegory and of naturalism—is, of course, omnipresent in Chaucer's work. Although not averse to breaking a lance against those critics who tend to give a symbolic reading wherever possible, building Freudulent prose-poems of their own on a Chaucerian "ground" (musically speaking) or transforming the General Prologue into the celebration of a mystery, yet we cannot ignore the frequent intrusion of other-world figures into a realistic scene, such as the presence of Pluto and Proserpina in the garden of January; or, on the contrary, the injecting of moments of vivid actuality into an unrealistic texture, as in the tale of the Man of Law; or the sudden intervention of alien moralizing conventions in a naturalistic context, such as Criseyde's complaint against worldly joy, and Troilus' Boethian inner dispute on predestination while Pandarus waits in suspended animation; or Dorigen's classical cadenza; or the Reeve's moral indict-

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ment of old men; or the Pardoner's self-condemnation. Sometimes these transitions and interactions of opposing states are destructive of conviction or imaginative acceptance, and at other times they are almost unbelievably successful. The Pardoner's Tale provides a noteworthy illustration of Chaucer's triumphant defiance of this conflict. Here, we commence with the naturalistic though generalized scene of the Flemish tavern filled with the bustling figures of rioting youth—a Kermess by an earlier Breughel. The scene thins out as the eye comes to focus on a little knot of these rioters who have drunk out the night together, with a servant-lad and the tavern-keeper in attendance hard by. Their wild revel is interrupted by the passing-bell of a funeral procession outside, and they learn that one of their booncompanions is being carried to his grave. He has died that very night in a drunken seizure. Suddenly, the servantknave's words lift us to another plane of reality, the realm of personified abstraction: "Ther cam a privée theef, men clepeth Deeth, That in this contrée al the peple sleeth, And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo, And wente his wey withouten wordes mo. He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence. And, maister, er ye come in his presence, Me thynketh that it were necessarie For to be war of swich an adversarle. Beth redy for to meete hym everemoore." (VI, 675-683)

The taveraer confirms these words, and declares his belief that this formidable opponent of their security lives at a nearby town, where lately he has been wreaking havoc on the inhabitants. This, suddenly, is the world of the miracle play. The chief actors, however, remain at the level of every day, swear brotherhood, and set out to find and kill the thief who took their fellow's life. They are the nearly undifferentiated, nameless epitome of wild unprincipled youth, and the natural enemies of whatever or whosoever limits their

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freedom. When, half a mile from their starting-point—for the following episodes are solidly fixed in the spatial dimension—they are met by a poor old man, "al forwrapped save [his] face" (which is sufficient index of his years), they conceive the instant revulsion of young men from the aged. Age is the next thing to death, and is the more abhorrent in that it presumes to share life with those to whom life belongs. "So old as you are," says the proudest of the three rioters, "it's high time you were dead: why aren't you?" ("Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?") In this scene, we are still in the land of the living, and if the old man personifies anything, it is simply the wisdom and gravity of his years. He has seen headlong youth before, and he understands what effects spring from what causes. Age has detached him from the passions and ambitions of men and he is waiting to die. Suspended between life and death, his thought and speech have acquired a gnomic character. He is himself no symbol of Death, nor is he Death's messenger in any supernatural sense; but rather the witness of earthly change, and the assurance of natural law. Human conduct is generally predictable; and, if he tells these gallows-birds how to get sudden riches—which are no longer of use to him—he knows what the results are likely to be. Turning his emaciated face full upon the brutal questioner, he answers with ironic deliberation. "The reason I am so old is that I cannot find, anywhere in the world, a young man who will exchange his youth for my age; and the reason I am still alive is that my wish for death has not yet been heard. But you, sirs, might have learned better manners than to insult an old man who has done nothing offensive towards you. Some day you may be in my situation. I go not whither I choose but whither I must. And, ride or walk, may God be with you." His advice is repaid with curses and threats; and, since he must reply to their demands after the whereabouts of Death, he admits that he has just seen the one they are so

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rashly seeking. He points up a crooked lane to an oak-grove where he knows that the wages of sin await them; and for the third and last time invokes upon them God's mercy. This impressive figure, it is critically important to observe, gets much of his purchase on our imagination by accepting, and using, the crude and materialistic personification of Death that motivates the other characters, while, at the same time, understanding and applying it in a deeper, figurative sense. Thereby, he is at once raised to a level of sophistication that in such a context carries an air of uncanny wisdom, and obscure power, and even—since the sequel vindicates his translation to a symbolic sense of the word as the underlying truth—of supernatural foreknowledge. Through this manipulation of the key figure, Death, reflecting forward and back on the other agents, the whole tale acquires its force and reach of allegorical meaning. Here, too, then, we can observe a refusal to be bound by the naturalistic controls that we had at first supposed Chaucer to be setting up for himself. But here he passes from one plane to another with such ease and confident mastery that we are hardly conscious of assenting to a miracle. Assent, unfortunately, is not so readily granted in another celebrated instance of Chaucer's art. The Clerk's Tale is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to reconcile to the modern imagination. Here Chaucer has received a story in good faith from laureate authority and proceeded, almost involuntarily, to render it inacceptable not only to us but possibly even to himself. It is very interesting to try to discover how this result may have come about. The difficulty here does not lie in the linking—as in the Pardoner's case: this has been fashioned with the poet's happiest art. With admirable economy, at the conclusion of the story, the everyday norm of the pilgrimage is re-established by means of the dramatic mock-reversal of the Clerk's values through his own eloquent lips. The joiner's work is quite visible at

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this point, in the lucky preservation of the alternative ending. Here again, as in the case previously examined, the device of an after-thought is employed, the Pardoner declaring, "But, sires, o word forgat I in my tale" (VI, 919), and the Clerk declaring, "But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go" (IV, 1163). In each case, that line marks a sudden shift of tone and attitude on the part of the speaker, leading to an ironic sequel to the serious narrative. In the Pardoner's case, as we have seen, the wrench could hardly be sustained by the context; but here it works perfectly. It beautifully bridges the gap between the idealism of the story and the level of life so solidly asserted by the Wife of Bath; and at the same time adds a facet to the Clerk's portrait—the Retort Courteous followed by the Quip Modest. Nothing is wrong with the frame: the trouble is within the tale itself and with its telling. A single passage is enough to lead us to the heart of the difficulty. After Grisilde is restored to her husband and her two children, she is naturally overcome by emotion. Her husband's gentle words so stun her that she cannot at first grasp them: She herde nat what thyng he to hire seyde; She ferde as she had stert out of a sleep, Til she out of hire mazednesse abreyde. (IV, 1059-1061)

And when the children are revealed as her own, "for pitous joye" she falls down in a swoon. Coming to herself, she embraces them with tears and kisses and poignant words of thanksgiving. She is ready, truly, to die for joy; and with the conflict of remembered woe and present happiness, she suddenly again falls senseless. The poet hereupon notes: And in hire swough so sadly holdeth she Hire children two, whan she gan hem t'embrace, That with greet sleighte and greet difficultee The children from hire arm they gonne arace.

(IV,1100-1103)

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By this harrowing circumstance, the mother's clutching her children with the tenacity of rigor mortis in her insensible state, Chaucer conveys a stabbing sense of the cost of years of unacknowledged suffering. That muscular contraction is the human animal's dumb protest against dilaceration. The scene is wholly Chaucer's: nothing like it is to be found in the known sources. And he has prepared for it by a heedful accounting of the lapse of time, from the first trials to the present moment, in lines that keep us aware of the children's advancing age (cf. 11. 442, 450, 610, 617, 736, 780). The heroine at this moment is all too human to be watched with equanimity. We cannot regard her as other than a creature of aching flesh and blood. But when we look for the cause of this suffering, we find a curious paradox. The cause is in fact Walter himself, who has been presented at the outset with respectful sympathy, as all that a noble young marquis ought to be. But, as the story proceeds, the narrator's attitude towards him changes to one of open denunciation, with which ours keeps pace. No effort is made to palliate his "cruel purpose," and his elaborate, prolonged, and exhaustive testing of his wife's masochistic endurance comes to seem a hideous experiment in torsion, performed out of vicious curiosity, not by love masquerading as policy but by a fiend masquerading as a husband. And we are not allowed meanwhile to adopt any other view. The lack of justifiable motive is insisted upon, not once but frequently. The poet—there is no need to differentiate the Clerk and Chaucer in this narrative—shares with us his own sense of outrage: Nedelees, God woot, he thoghte hire for t'affraye. He hadde assayed hire ynogh bifore.... . .. for me, I seye that yvele it sit To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede, And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede. (IV, 455-462)

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Further emphasis on Walter's barbarity, his "wikke usage," crops out in four other passages, all either invented by the poet or reinforced by him (cf. U. 619, 696, 730, 786). Throughout her torments, Grisilde never consciously wavers in her devotion and love for her husband (cf. 11. 361, 505, 664). After the second child has been snatched away, Walter waiteth if by word or contenance That she to hym was changed of corage; But nevere koude hé fynde variance. She was ay oon in herte and in visage; And ay the forther that she was in age, The moore trewe, if that it were possible, She was to hym in love, and moore penyble. For which it semed thus, that of hem two Ther nas but o wyl; for, as Walter leste, The same lust was hire plesance also. (IV, 708-717)

But, significantly, Chaucer on one noteworthy occasion cannot forbear allowing Grisilde the release of an implied rebuke. When Walter tells her to take back her dower and depart, she exclaims (on the poet's own responsibility) : "O goode God! how gentil and how kynde Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage The day that maked was oure mariage! But sooth is seyd—algate I fynde it trewe, For in effect it preeved is on me— Love is noght oold as whan that it is newe. (IV, 852-867)

And, notably again, the poet follows Petrarch and Boccaccio in having Grisilde warn her lord against tormenting (her word) his new wife as he did the old, lest being tenderly nurtured she prove unable to endure it. These points have been stressed because they prove that Chaucer is not regarding Grisilde as a personification of wifely obedience but as a sentient human being, and expecting his audience to do the same. Not only does he find it impossible to refrain from judging Walter's conduct by ordi-

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nary moral standards but also he rebukes the crowd when they show a disposition to approve that conduct: O stormy peple! unsad and evere untrewe!... Youre doom is fais, youre constance yvele preeveth. (IV, 995, 1000)

It is clear, then, that we are not encountering here a historical shift of sympathy. The poet's emotional attitude towards the tale is transparent and explicit; and it is ours. The pure symbol of meek and trusting submission has put on corruption, become a human figure in whom Chaucer himself believes. We are therefore faced with ethical as well as aesthetic considerations. If Grisilde is to be made to suffer innocently, the cause of that suffering, to be acceptable, must either (a) be rationally justified, or (b) be above our challenge. The keener our sense of her ordeal, the more necessary that it should be acceptably resolved. Neither of the possible alternatives, however, is met by the poet. As we have seen, he deliberately rejects the first. The second alternative might have taken one of several forms. Walter might have been made a bad man, incapable of pity or remorse, in which case we could find relief in hating him, as perchance we may Browning's Duke of Ferrara in "My Last Duchess." But Walter, for this, is too full of the milk of human kindness. Or again, Grisilde might—as in a modern rendering she certainly would—be battling the inexplicable and unpersonified evil in the universe we know. In that event we could wholeheartedly applaud her fortitude. Or, on the level of religious parable, the cause of her trials might be the Deity. This solution we should be likely to accept, not knowing how to resist it. Now, clearly, the poet—or the Clerk—is trying, though faintly, to establish his meaning on this last ground. To this end, much is done to create a tone of biblical narrative or pious legend, and there are many echoes of Scripture [107]

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scattered through the piece. Thus, Grisilde is born in the very humblest home of all that little world: But hye God somtyme senden kan His grace into a litel oxes stalle. (IV, 206-207)

Janicula receives the news of Walter's choice of a wife with religious humility: "Lord," quod he, "my willynge Is as yé wole, ne ayeynes youre likynge I wol no thyng, ye be my lord so deere." (IV, 319-321 )

Conversion and transfiguration are shadowed in Grisilde's putting off the old and putting on the new life, in the scene of her "despoiling" and splendid "translation," preparatory to departure from her father's hut to the marquis's palace. Her speeches then and later, expressing her sense of her own unworthiness of the honour to which she has been exalted, are full of biblical modulations (Rebecca, Ruth, Mary). The allusions to Job are explicit: "Naked out of my fadres hous," quod she, I cam, and naked moot I turne agayn. Al youre plesance wol I folwen fayn." (IV, 871-873)

Her father curses the day that he was born; and she herself is likened to Job. But all this effort to turn the story into a religious parable splits on the rock of Walter's too too solid flesh. Although in Grisilde's humble eyes he is tantamount to the Deity, so far above her and so inscrutable is he to her faithful heart, he yet never becomes such a symbol in the story, either for narrator or for us. Grisilde's point of view never wins acceptance elsewhere. We might allow that for purposes of moral doctrine God's dealing with man, being utterly inexplicable, can only be symbolized by complete non-rationality. But Walter's unreasonableness never suggests God's inexplicability, nor does it seem ever to deserve respect—as the [108]

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author himself is ready to agree. There is no aura of mystery round it. If we compare this story with an actual biblical story in the points where our difficulties have been felt to be acute, we may be able to see a little more clearly into what is involved. Here the Sacrifice of Abraham offers a helpful parallel, even if the extraordinary economy of that narrative is a handicap. Abraham and Grisilde are in a comparable situation. Abraham's, however, is still worse, because he is himself the chosen instrument of destruction, and the deed enjoined upon him is even more excruciating than anything imagined by Grisilde. Whereas Grisilde's maternal tenderness at parting with her children is given most affecting expression, with descriptive comparison added, Abraham's paternal feelings are passed over in complete silence. The factual account quite ignores the emotional side of the narrative, which must be inferred, subjectively, through the forms of speech: And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay hislson.

The emotional restraint—rather, the absence of any surface expression of emotion whatsoever—is all that makes the scene endurable. In the other story, on the contrary, our feelings are harrowed up with affecting detail:

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And in hir barm this litel child she leyde With ful sad face, and gan the child to kisse, And lulled it, and after gan it blisse. And thus she seyde in hire bénigne voys, 'Tareweel my child! I shal thee nevere see.. .. Thy soule, litel child, I Hym bitake, For this nyght shaltow dyen for my sake." (IV, 551-560)

Like Grisilde's, Abraham's attitude is one of absolute and unquestioning obedience; but here, too, in the degree to which his duty is more violent and terrible, we may feel that his devotion surpasses hers. And again, not a word is given to direct expression or description: acts tell all. Whereas Grisilde submissively answers Walter at length on those occasions when the latter expresses his intentions, Abraham says not so much as "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." But we are left in no doubt about his acquiescence. Walter rationalizes his own actions to Grisilde, step by step; but finally, for public consumption, declares: "I have doon this deede For no malice, ne for no crueltee, But for t'assaye in thee thy wommanheede. . . . Til I thy purpos knewe and al thy wille." (IV, 1073-1078)

God's purpose with Abraham is presented, on the contrary, without editorial comment, and issues at once in a stark command: And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham.... And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

The command, however savage, is far above challenge, just as for Grisilde is Walter's. God relents, as does Walter, when he has satisfied himself of Abraham's entire fidelity. We must not say, as we can of Walter, "when he has slaked his curio-

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sity." But that is not because his purpose stands rational scrutiny on limited human grounds of insight any the better. The worse, rather: for as the All-Knowing, he must already be satisfied: he possesses present knowledge of Abraham's future fidelity and his destiny. Nor does he demonstrate Abraham's steadfastness before any other tribunal than himself. His object is undecipherable to mortal eyes: we do not even know that the pain he caused was cruel. We know only that he was pleased at the result. It is not to be doubted that Chaucer, following Petrarch, set down his deepest meaning at the end of the Clerk's Tale, when he wrote that he—or the Clerk—was offering, not an example of humility for wives to emulate towards their husbands, but a paradigm for all of us, of constancy in adversity: For, sith a womman was so pacient Unto a mortal man, wel moore us oghte Receyven al in gree that God us sent; For greet skile is, he preeve that he wroghte. (IV, 1149-1152)

God tries us, Saint James says, not to know our intent, for he knew our weakness even before we were born; but he allows us to be scourged for our own benefit and discipline. The Clerk refers explicitly to this passage from the Epistle of James: My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. . . . Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him. Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.

Now, of course, as a demonstration of this text, the Clerk's sermon—so to call it—breaks down. It breaks on the specific point emphasized by St. James: "for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man." Walter, on

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the contrary, is sorely tempted with evil, not once but often, as the poet charges, and over a decade's span, merely to try whether his so perfect wife will not give way under sufficient strain. In so proceeding, he not only wrongs her but he puts her in the wrong as well. For he forces her to accept his savagery to herself and to her children, not as though it were just and right but as true justice, with glad and trusting grace; or else be derelict from her vows. In shunning a fault, she is betrayed into profounder wrong, a deeper infidelity to motherhood and to the light of truth. The poet does not blame her: this perversion of values is inherent in the story. But in praising her, he involuntarily falls into the same trap and assents to the evil. His moral judgment is suborned by the pathos of her lot. The underlying ambivalence is only superficially resolved by overt condemnation of Walter and the heightening of sympathy for Grisilde. We cannot but feel that ultimately the ironic Envoy answers more than the dramatic needs of the occasion vis-a-vis the Wife of Bath, and serves as a genuine, though unconscious, repudiation of the false morality that the poet was forced by the story to espouse. The ground-swell of this release continues to be felt throughout the following tale of the Merchant, which pours its venom not primarily on the faithlessness of the young wife but on the besotted head of old January. This emphasis runs athwart the conscious purpose of the Merchant, and emerges like a delayed revenge for the previous outrage on feminine patience. From similar pitfalls implicit in the story of Abraham's Sacrifice the biblical narrator is saved by a cryptic aloofness, a bareness of statement with formulae akin to genuine folkstyle. For example, the phrase, "And they went both of them together," occurring both before and after the interchange between father and son, is a folk-like understatement, unapproachably poignant, of their psychological relation: the son's trust, his single doubt and its allaying, the father's love

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in thrall to his deadly duty, the considerate irony of his loveprompted reply, the chasm separating the two as they walk side by side, unsuspected by the child, unbridgeable by the father. When the phrase recurs, its increment of meaning is enormous: And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

The lamb, we notice incidentally, is Isaac's own concretization: Abraham merely adopts the term after him. But, as metaphor, its place could not be filled by the ram which God later provides. Grisilde's clinging to her children when she swoons might by itself have carried some of this pregnancy of meaning, but the bare fact is not allowed to do its work unassisted: O many a teere on many a pitous face Doun ran of hem that stooden hire bisyde; Unnethe abouten hire myghte they abyde. (IV, 1104-1106)

Pity is contagious. Chaucer was unable to resist the temptations of fuller realization, and we may readily allow that, for Chaucer especially, these were very great. They were in part the concomitants of the mere physical conditions of his craft, and equally provocative of his special virtues. The biblical narrator was recording sacred history and faced, we suppose, no problem of an audience—no need to enlist sympathy or explain motive or attitude. But Chaucer was intimately involved with an immediate audience and was inevitably and continuously aware of present effects. We recall that in the Troilus he had managed, with unbelievable subtlety, to preserve the precarious balance between himself and his audience on the one side, himself and his characters on the other, now setting an example of tolerant detachment, now suggesting possible explanations, now professing ignorance, now confiding his own ironic reservations, now avoiding social embarrassment by screening his intense private

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sympathy for the lovers behind his fictitious "Author," by disclaimers of personal experience and appeals to the knowing in love to eke out his meagre account. In the Knight's Tale, he had distanced Emilye to the formal outlines of a gracious tapestry figure, with the contiguous shapes richly pictorial and in keeping. There everything was in due psychic relation. In The Legend of Good Women, he had displayed upon occasion a perfect tact in the conventional representation of suffering. One need only cite the generalizing or typifying power of the successive hows in the account of Thisbe's frenzy when she discovers the dying Pyramus. They fairly drug the pain of a direct report: Who coude wryte .. . how hire heer she rente, And how she gan hireselve to turmente, And how she lyth and swouneth on the grounde, And how she wep of teres ful his wounde; How medeleth she his blod with hire compleynte; How with his blod hireselve gan she peynte; How clyppeth she the deede cors, allas! How doth this woful Tisbe in this cas! (870-877)

There was never more need for such a formalizing and distancing than in this symbolic story of the Clerk's; Yet here, watching the characters with his audience, and stirred like them to active response, Chaucer tossed caution aside; and, falling into the pit, only dug it deeper in his efforts to accommodate an intolerable situation to his and their physical and psychological needs. Actual life had encroached upon the realm of ideal values. This, I believe, is not at bottom a problem purely aesthetic, or indicative of settled artistic decisions on Chaucer's part. It is, rather, an unconscious, an involuntary yielding of principle, weakened by sympathy and by native gifts. But we must revert at last to the question of Chaucer's primary convictions. In spite of his extraordinary power to make a scene or a character come to life in the mind's eye, it is not

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to be lightly concluded that he gave more than a limited and temporary assent to values that we would call naturalistic. Consciously, in fact, in the piece just examined, he persists in forcing a symbolic reading that cannot be upheld. There is no evidence that he ever consciously rejected earlier, more idealistic modes of representation, or that in sum total his genius—as our associations with the label, "Chaucer's English Period," tend to suggest—was shutting him off from ingrained mediaeval ways of thought. Mediaeval, we say; but it were perhaps better to say Christian, for they took root a thousand years before Chaucer's birth, and they long outlasted him. Chaucer never wrote anything with more profound conviction than the close of Troilus and Criseyde: And thynketh al nys but a faire This world, that passeth soone as floures faire.

"Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse," he wrote in his ballade, "Truth"; and, so believing, he was unable to put forward his deepest meaning in terms of the data of everyday existence. It is no accident that it is the fabliaux that are the most drenched of all his pieces in naturalistic detail. They are the most earthly of his writings, and, by the same token —apart from morality in the narrower sense—in his eyes the most limited and least valuable. We may prize them the more, and justify our judgment by claims of superior artistry and by appeals to the higher criticism that might have amazed him. When he came to total up, towards the end of his life, "the book of the tales of Caunterbury, compiled by Geffrey Chaucer," no ripe artistic judgment admonished him to leave out the Man of Law's Tale, the Physician's Tale, the Second Nun's Tale; and to the two weightiest members of the pilgrimage, himself and the Parson, he paid the compliment of assigning the most abstract pieces of all. Ultimately we must assent that Chaucer translated the Melibeus and gave it to himself because he, like his thoughtful contem-

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poraries, greatly admired it. Of all the tales, it most completely answers the highest ends of mediaeval purpose: that is, it is most completely liberated from the impedimenta of mortality, the encumbrances of space and time; its characters, personifications duly named, are the most completely idealized; and it is most packed with moral sentiment. This was a tale that Chaucer would never retract. Indeed, it is a modern anamorphosis to look at The Canterbury Tales as a realistic comedy in which the pilgrims are the dramatis personae for the developing of whose characters their stories are told. Rather, the pilgrims supply a naturalistic point of departure, from which the poet, as he pleases, rises to a loftier perspective, or seeks out ancient altars, or ranges beyond the familiar bounds of space and time. It is the tales that generally disclose the wider reference, the more universal application: that take us to the past, the distant, and the unknown, that open to us the world of books, the vision, or the ideal. "Whatever"—I cannot forbear to quote Johnson once more—"Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings."3 Though for us, perhaps, the pilgrims may appear symbolic in their typicality, sociological and physiognomical—yet for Chaucer, we must believe, they were far closer to the raw stuff of life. And marvellous as are the linking scenes in their pictorial immediacy, in their human awareness and essential vitality, it is not for us to invert the scale of values and then attribute that distortion to Chaucer. For him, as for his thoughtful contemporaries and predecessors, the deeper meanings lie beyond the passing show, and not in it. Between the tales and the tellers, there is a difference that we are not meant to ignore: the difference between two worlds. But both by contrast and by resemblance they help to explain each 3

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, "Icolmkill."

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other; and this is equally true of their appearances in all of Chaucer's narrative writing, in the dream-visions, and in the Troilus and Criseyde. It is the story of Ceyx and Alcyone that carries the "message" of The Book of the Duchess—not anything that the dreamer says or observes either before, or after, or during the dream. It is the Dream of Scipio that provides a glass through which to view the poet's own delightful parliamentary dream—the noble ideal of Cicero, summarized in his book. It was in no spirit of idle vacancy that Chaucer brooded over that, or over Dante's vision, or over Boethius. Moreover, though, for us, Pandarus and Criseyde are the most convincing of all Chaucer's people, and because of their immediacy to our sense of life and their human imperfection the most fascinating, yet for Chaucer it was Troilus who essentialized the meaning of his poem; who, as the exemplar of earth's best values, of undaunted valour, steadfastness, and absolute fidelity to his ideal, tested most profoundly the tragic implications of human existence. His comparative unreality in the context of his immediate society is possibly the supreme and most significant instance of the collision in Chaucer's work between actuality and ideality. For it is because he is so nearly a personification of certain high human values that he can become the ultimate proof of their limited avail in a world that only rarely proves capable of meeting them. For life nearly always speaks to us in the language of compromise. And it is this perplexed and perplexing, yet familiar, language of which Chaucer himself is an inspired master.

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