ever devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and "reporter." In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors. The little "head-links" and "end-links" which bind them together give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the prologue of the Wife of Bath, to full and almost dramatic character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches, the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some fifty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's descriptions, living and universal types of human nature. The Canterbury Tales are twenty-four in number. There were thirty-two pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories.
Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like many another great poet he put the final touch to the various literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his Knight's Tale, based upon Boccaccio's Teseide, is the best of English mediæval romances. And yet the Rime of Sir Thopas, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints' legends. The Monk's Tale is a set of dry, moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the "moral Gower." The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant belong to the class of fabliaux, a few of which existed in English, such as Dame Siriz, the Lay of the Ash, and the Land of Cokaygne, already mentioned. The Nonne Preste's Tale, likewise, which Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of fabliaux, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, Dou Coc et Werpil, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the early English poem of The Fox and the Wolf, to the popular animal saga of Reynard the Fox. The Franklin's Tale, whose scene is Brittany, and the Wife of Bath's Tale which is laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French lais, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful lais of Marie de France.
Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom he says,
And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.
Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor parson in the Canterbury Tales, the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be a "loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, and that, because he objects to the jovial innkeeper's swearing "by Goddes bones."
Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere's, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read, is correct and melodious. The early English was, in some respects, "more sweet upon the tongue" than the modern language. The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterals and vocalic syllables, like the endings ën, ës, ë, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together.
Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites "auctours" and gives long catalogues of names and objects with a naïve display of learning; and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages—at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise.
The Canterbury Tales had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry VI. (1422–1471). Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some fifteen thousand smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel Pucel.
1. Early English Literature. Bernhard ten Brink. Translated from the German by H.M. Kennedy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1883.
2. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.
3. The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. Edited by W.W. Skeat. Oxford, 1886.
4. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Tyrwhitt's Edition. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883.
5. The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by Richard Morris. London: Bell & Daldy (6 volumes.)
CHAPTER II.
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.
1400–1599.
The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet came whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the Court of Love, the Flower and the Leaf, the Cuckow and the Nightingale, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as the Boke of the Duchesse and the Parlament of Foules.
Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his Governail of Princes, a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS.