A Literary History of the English People Part 33

A! yif that frere a peny and let him go....

Thomas, of me thou shalt nat ben y-flatered; Thou woldest ban our labour al for noght.[537]

Pay then, give then, give me this, or only that; Thomas gives less still.

Familiar scenes, equally true but of a more pleasing kind, are found in other narratives, for instance in the story of Chauntecleer the c.o.c.k, so well localised with a few words, in a green, secluded country nook:

A poure widwe, somdel stope in age Was whylom dwelling in a narwe cotage, Bisyde a grove, standing in a dale.

Her stable, her barn-yard are described; we hear the lowing of the cows and the crowing of the c.o.c.k; the tone rises little by little, and we get to the mock-heroic style. Chauntecleer the c.o.c.k,

In al the land of crowing nas his peer.

His vois was merier than the mery orgon On messe-days that in the chirche gon; Wel sikerer was his crowing in his logge Than is a clokke, or an abbey orlogge....

His comb was redder than the fyn coral, And batailed, as it were a castel-wal!

He had a black beak, white "nayles," and azure legs; he reigned unrivalled over the hens in the barn-yard. One of the hens was his favourite, the others filled subalternate parts. One day--

This storie is al-so trewe, I undertake As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, That wommen holde in ful gret reverence,

--he was looking for "a boterflye," and what should he see but a fox!

"c.o.k, c.o.k!" he cries, with a jump, and means to flee.

"Gentil sire, allas! wher wol ye gon?

Be ye affrayed of me that am your freend?"

says the good fox; I came only to hear you sing; you have the family talent:

My lord your fader (G.o.d his soule blesse!),

sang so well; but you sing better still. To sing better still, the c.o.c.k shuts his eye, and the fox bears him off. Most painful adventure! It was a Friday: such things always befall on Fridays.

O Gaufred, dere mayster soverayn, That whan the worthy King Richard was slayn With shot, compleynedest his deth so sore, Why ne had I now thy sentence and thy lore, The Friday for to chide, as diden ye?[538]

Great commotion in the barn-yard; and here we find a picture charming for its liveliness: "Out! harrow! and weyl-away! Ha, ha, the fox!" every one shrieks, yells, runs; the dogs bark,

Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges;

the ducks scream,

The gees for fere flowen over the trees,

and the bees come out of their hives. The prisoner is set free; he will be more prudent another time; order reigns once more in the domains of Chauntecleer.

Side by side with such tales of animals, we have elegant stories of the Round Table, borrowed from the lays of "thise olde gentil Britons," and which carry us back to a time when,

In tholde dayes of the King Arthour Of which that Britons speken greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye; The elf-queen, with hir joly companye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;

oriental legends, which the young squire will relate, with enchantments, magic mirrors, a bra.s.s horse that transports its rider through the air, here or there according as one touches a peg in its ears, an ancestor doubtless of "Clavilegno," the steed of Don Quixote in the d.u.c.h.esse's park; biographies of Appius and Virginia, of Caesar, of Nero, of Holophernes, of Hugolino in the tower of hunger, taken from Roman history, the Bible and Dante; adventures of chivalry, in which figures Theseus, duke of Athens, where blood flows profusely, with all the digressions and all the embellishments which still continued to please great men and great ladies, and that is why the story is told by the knight, and Chaucer retains purposely all the faults of that particular sort of story. In opposition to his usual custom, he contents himself here with lending a little life to illuminations of ma.n.u.scripts.[539]

Grave personages relate grave stories, like canticles or sermons, coloured as with the light of stained gla.s.s, perfumed with incense, accompanied by organ music: story of the pious Constance, of St.

Cecilia, of a child killed by the Jews; dissertations of dame Prudence (a tale of wondrous dulness,[540] which Chaucer modestly ascribes to himself); story of the patient Griselda; discourse of the poor parson. A while ago we were at the inn; now we are in church; in the Middle Ages striking colours and decided contrasts were best liked; the faded tints that have since been in fashion, mauve, cream, old-green, did not touch any one; and we know that Chaucer, when he was a page, had a superb costume, of which one leg was red and the other black. Laughter was inextinguishable; it rose and fell and rose again, rebounding indefinitely; despair was immeasurable; the sense of _measure_ was precisely what was wanting; its vulgarisation was one of the results of the Renaissance. Panegyrics and satires were readily carried to the extreme. The logical spirit, propagated among the learned by a scholastic education, was producing its effect: writers drew apart one single quality or characteristic and descanted upon it, neglecting all the rest. Thus it is that Griselda becomes Patience, and Janicola Poverty, and that by an easy and imperceptible transition the abstract personages of novels and the drama are created: Cowardice, Valiance, Vice. Those typical beings, whose names alone make us shudder, were considered perfectly natural; and, indeed, they bore a striking resemblance to Griselda, Janicola, and many other heroes of the most popular stories.

The success of Griselda is the proof of it. That poor girl, married to the marquis of Saluces, who repudiates her in order to try her patience, and then gives her back her position of wife, enjoyed an immense popularity. Boccaccio had related her misfortunes in the "Decameron"; Petrarch thought the story so beautiful that it appeared to him worthy of that supreme honour, a Latin translation: Chaucer translated it in his turn from Latin into English, and made of it his Clerk of Oxford's tale;[541] it was turned several times into French.[542] Pinturicchio represented the adventures of Griselda in a series of pictures, now preserved in the National Gallery; the story furnished the subject of plays in Italy, in France, and in England.[543] These exaggerated descriptions were just what went to the very heart; people wept over them in the fourteenth century as over Clarissa in the eighteenth.

Petrarch, writing to Boccaccio about Griselda, uses almost the same terms as Lady Bradshaigh, writing to Richardson about Clarissa:

"Had you seen me, I surely should have moved your pity. When alone, in agonies would I lay down the book, take it up again, walk about the room, let fall a flood of tears, wipe my eyes, read again--perhaps not three lines--throw away the book, crying out: 'Excuse me, good Mr.

Richardson, I cannot go on; it is your fault, you have done more than I can bear.'"[544]

I made "one of our mutual friends from Padua," writes Petrarch, "a man of elevated mind and vast learning, read this story. He had hardly got half through, when suddenly he stopped, choking with tears; a moment after, having composed himself, he took up the narrative once more to continue reading, and, behold, a second time sobs stopped his utterance.

He declared it was impossible for him to continue, and he made a person of much instruction, who accompanied him, finish the reading." About that time, in all probability, Petrarch, who, as we see in the same letter, liked to renew the experience, gave the English poet and negotiator, who had come to visit him in his retreat, this tale to read, and Chaucer, for that very reason less free than with most of his other stories, scarcely altered anything in Petrarch's text. With him as with his model, Griselda is Patience, nothing more; everything is sacrificed to that virtue; Griselda is neither woman nor mother; she is only the patient spouse, Patience made wife. They take her daughter from her, to be killed, as they tell her, by order of the marquis. So be it, replies Griselda:

"Goth now," quod she, "and dooth my lordes heste; But o thing wil I preye yow of your grace.

That, but my lord forbad yow, atte leste, Burieth this litel body in som place, That bestes ne no briddes it to-race."

But he no word wol to that purpos seye, But took the child and wente upon his weye.[545]

Whereupon every one goes into ecstasies, and is greatly affected. The idea of entreating her husband, of throwing herself at his feet, of trying to move him, never enters her mind; she would no longer be playing her part, which is not to be a mother, but to be: Patience.

Chaucer left his collection of tales uncompleted; we have less than the half of it; but he wrote enough to show to the best his manifold qualities. There appear in perfect light his masterly gifts of observation, of comprehension, and of sympathy; we well see with what art he can make his characters stand forth, and how skilfully they are chosen to represent all contemporaneous England. The poet shows himself full of heart, and at the same time full of sense; he is not without suspicion that his pious stories, indispensable to render his picture complete, may offend by their monotony and exaggerated good sentiments.

In giving them place in his collection, he belongs to his time and helps to make it known; but a few mocking notes, scattered here and there, show that he is superior to his epoch, and that, in spite of his long dissertations and his digressions, he has, what was rare at that period, a certain notion, at least theoretical, of the importance of proportion.

He allows his heroes to speak, but he is not their dupe; in fact he is so little their dupe that sometimes he can stand their talk no longer, and interrupts them or laughs at them to their very face. He laughs in the face of the tiresome Constance, on the night of her wedding; he shows us his companions riding drowsily on their horses to the sound of the monk's solemn stories, and hardly preserved from actual slumber by the noise of the horse's bells. He allows the host abruptly to interrupt him when, to satirise the romances of chivalry, he relates, in "rym dogerel," the feats of arms and marvellous adventures of the matchless Sir Thopas.[546] Before we could even murmur the word "improbable," he warns us that the time of Griseldas has pa.s.sed, and that there exist no more such women in our day. As the pilgrims draw near Canterbury, and it becomes seemly to finish on a graver note, he causes his poor parson to speak, and the priest announces beforehand that his discourse will be a sermon, a real sermon, with a text from Scripture: "Incipit sermo," says one of the ma.n.u.scripts. He will speak in prose, as in church:

Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest, Whan I may sowen whete if that me lest?

All agree, and it is with the a.s.sent of his companions, who become more serious as they approach the holy city, that he commences, for the good of their souls, his ample "meditation." The coa.r.s.e story told by the miller had been justified by excuses no less appropriate to the person and to the circ.u.mstances; the person was a clown, and chanced to be drunk; now the person is a saint, and, as it happens, they are just nearing the place of pilgrimage.

The good sense which caused the poet to write his "Canterbury Tales"

according to a plan so conformable to reason and to nature, is one of the most eminent of Chaucer's qualities. It reveals itself in the details as in the whole scheme, and inspires him, in the midst of his most fanciful inventions, with rea.s.suring remarks which show that earth and real life are not far away, and that we are not in danger of falling from the clouds. He reminds us at an opportune moment that there is a certain n.o.bility, the highest of all, which cannot be bequeathed in a will; that the corrupt specimens of a social cla.s.s should not cause the whole cla.s.s to be condemned:

Of every ordre som shrewe is, parde;[547]

that, in the education of children, parents should be careful not to treat them too soon as men; if one takes them to merry-makings before time, they become "to sone rype and bold, ... which is ful perilous." He expresses himself very freely about great captains, each of whom would have been called "an outlawe or a theef" had they done less harm.[548]

This last idea is put forth in a few lines of a humour so truly English that it is impossible not to think of Swift and Fielding; and, indeed, Fielding can the more appropriately be named here as he has devoted all his novel of "Jonathan Wild the Great" to the expounding of exactly the same thesis.

Finally, we owe to this same common sense of Chaucer's a thing more remarkable yet: namely, that with his knowledge of Latin and of French, and living in a circle where those two languages were in great favour, he wrote solely in English. His prose, like his verse, his "Treatise on the Astrolabe" like his tales, are in English. He belongs to the English nation, and that is why he writes in that language; a reason of that sort is sufficient for him: "Suffyse to thee thise trewe conclusiouns in English, as wel as suffyseth to thise n.o.ble clerkes Grekes thise same conclusiouns in Greek, and to Arabians in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to the Latin folk in Latin." Chaucer, then, will make use of plain English, "naked wordes in English"; he will employ the national language, the king's English--"the king that is lord of this langage."[549] And he will use it, as in truth he did, to express exactly his thoughts and not to embellish them; he hates travesty, he worships truth; he wants words and things to be in the closest possible relation:

The wordes mote be cosin to the dede.[550]

The same wisdom is again the cause why Chaucer does not spend himself in vain efforts to attempt impossible reforms, and to go against the current. It has been made a subject of reproach to him in our day; and some, from love of the Saxon past, have been indignant at the number of French words Chaucer uses; why did he not go back to the origins of the language? But Chaucer was not one of those who, as Milton says, think "to pound up the crows by shutting their park gates;" he employed the national tongue, as it existed in his day; the proportion of French words is not greater with him than with the ma.s.s of his contemporaries.

The words he made use of were living and fruitful, since they are still alive, they and their families; the proportion of those that have disappeared is wonderfully small, seeing the time that has elapsed. As to the Anglo-Saxons, he retained, as did the nation, but without being aware of it, something of their grave and powerful genius; it is not his fault if he ignored these ancestors; every one in his day ignored them, even such thinkers as Langland, in whom lived again with most force the spirit of the ancient Germanic race. The tradition was broken; in the literary past one went back to the Conquest, and thence without transition to "thise olde gentil Britons." In his enumeration of celebrated bards, Chaucer gives a place to Orpheus, to Orion, and to the "Bret Glascurion"; but no author of any "Beowulf" is named by him.

Shakespeare, in the same manner, will derive inspiration from the national past; he will go back to the time of the Roses, to the time of the Plantagenets, to the time of Magna Charta, and, pa.s.sing over the Anglo-Saxon period, he will take from the Britons the stories of Lear and of Cymbeline.

The brilliancy with which Chaucer used this new tongue, the instant fame of his works, the clear proof afforded by his writings that English could fit the highest and the lowest themes, a.s.sured to that idiom its definitive place among the great literary languages. English still had, in Chaucer's day, a tendency to resolve itself into dialects; as, in the time of the Conquest, the kingdom had still a tendency to resolve itself into sub-kingdoms. Chaucer knew this, and was concerned about it; he was anxious about those differences of tongue, of orthography, and of vocabulary; he did all in his power to regularise these discordances; he had set ideas on the subject; and, what was rare in those days, the whims of copyists made him shudder. Nothing shows better the faith he had in the English tongue, as a literary language, than his reiterated injunctions to the readers and scribes who shall read his poems aloud or copy them. He experiences already, concerning his work, the anxieties of the poets of the Renaissance:

And for ther is so greet diversitee In English, and in writyng of our tonge, So preye I G.o.d, that noon miswryte thee, Ne thee mysmetre for defaute of tonge, And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe, That thou be understonde I G.o.d beseche![551]

Chaucer himself looked over the transcriptions done from his original ma.n.u.scripts by his amanuensis Adam; he corrected with minute care every fault; he calls down all manner of woe upon the "scriveyn's" head, if, copying once more "Boece" or "Troilus," he leaves as many errors again.[552] We seem to hear Ronsard himself addressing his supplications to the reader: "I implore of you one thing only, reader, to p.r.o.nounce well my verses and suit your voice to their pa.s.sion ... and I implore you again, where you will see this sign: (!) to raise your voice a little, to give grace to what you read."[553]

Chaucer's efforts were not exercised in vain; they a.s.sisted the work of concentration. After him, the dialects lost their importance; the one he used, the East Midland dialect, has since become the language of the nation.

His verse, too, is the verse of the new literature, formed by a compromise between the old and the new prosody. Alliteration, which is not yet dead, and which is still used in his time, he does not like; its jingle seems to him ridiculous: