Chaucer And His Times Part 14

And in a litel erber that I have, Y-benched newe with turves fresshe y-grave, I bad men shulde me my couche make; For deyntee of the newe someres sake I bad hem strowe floures on my bed.

But here again it is impression rather than actual description.

True to the city-bred instinct, Chaucer sees winter rather as the king of intimate delights and fire-side pleasures, than as having an especial beauty of his own. The _Frankeleyns Tale_ contains a picture of December which brings the comfort of ingle-nook and steaming cup vividly before us:--

The bittre frostes, with the sleet and reyn, Destroyed hath the grene in every yerd.

Ja.n.u.s sit by the fyr, with double berd, And drinketh of his bugle-horn the wyn.

Before him stant braun of the tusked swyn, And "Nowel" cryeth every l.u.s.ty man.

We almost feel the pleasant glow of the fire, and hear the great logs hiss and crackle.

It is impossible to read Chaucer's descriptions of nature without being struck by his love of birds and animals, and especially of the smaller and more helpless kinds. Birds occupy a large place in his affections. He is perpetually pausing to call attention to them and spring is to him pre-eminently the time when "smale fowles maken melodye." Here again he shows little minute observation or discrimination, it is birds in general, rather than any bird in particular, that he loves. To praise the song of a nightingale can hardly be reckoned any proof of special bird-lore, and except in the _Parlement of Foules_, Chaucer scarcely mentions any other bird by name. The crow, who is the real hero of the _Maunciples Tale_, and who distinguishes himself by singing, "cukkow! cukkow! cukkow!" can no more be regarded as an ordinary, unsophisticated bird than can the eagle who acts as Jove's messenger in the _Hous of Fame_, or the princess disguised as a falcon who seeks Canace's aid. The _Parlement of Foules_, it is true, shows that Chaucer knew the names of a considerable number of birds, but the epithets that he applies to each show no more real knowledge of their habits than the epithets which he (or rather, Boccaccio) applies to the various trees, in an earlier stanza, show any love of forestry. The oak is useful for building purposes, and the elm makes good coffins. In like manner, the owl forebodes death, and the swallow eats flies, or rather, if we are to believe Chaucer, bees.

Regarded as individuals, the birds are delightfully convincing: regarded as birds they are dismissed rather carelessly, though, since it is Chaucer who dismisses them, an occasional happy phrase redeems the pa.s.sage from dullness and monotony.

But it is not only in a love of birds, which, after all, is common to most poets, that Chaucer shows this side of his nature. Reference has already been made to the whelp and the squirrels which he introduces into the _Book of the d.u.c.h.esse_. The little coneys who hasten to their play in the garden of the _Parlement of Foules_ are due in the first place to Boccaccio, but the Italian merely tells us that they "go hither and thither." His picture is dainty and pretty, but it lacks the half-amused tenderness of Chaucer's. Chaucer, it is evident, loves them all, bird and beast, sportive coney and timid roe, not forgetting the

Squerels, and bestes smale of gentil kinde.

The following stanza affords ill.u.s.tration of another point in Chaucer's descriptions. Master of melody as he is, he has not learned the subtle art of suiting sound to sense, and producing a definite sensuous impression by sheer music. It is impossible to read of these

--instruments of strenges in acord

which make so ravishing a sweetness, without finding one's thoughts involuntarily carried on to Spenser's enchanted garden in which

Th' Angelicall soft trembling voyces made To th' instruments divine respondence meet....

Chaucer's little wind--"unethe it might be lesse"--which makes a soft noise in the green leaves, is too fresh ever to blow across the flowers of Acrasia's garden, but the Bower of Bliss casts a spell over us of which Chaucer has not the secret. He is too frankly of this world to be at home in fairy-land, and the note of sincerity which sounds throughout his verse would accord ill with such intoxicating sweetness. Lady Pride and her followers, Dame Caelia and her fair daughters, Fidelia, Speranza, and Carita, find a natural home in Spenser's world of wonders. But Chaucer's allegorical personages must needs either come to life and turn into actual human beings, like the birds in the _Parlement of Foules_, or remain stiff abstractions, like Plesaunce, and Delyt, and Gentilnesse, and the other symbolic inhabitants of the garden of the Rose.

CHAPTER VII

SOME VIEWS OF CHAUCER'S ON MEN AND THINGS

The late fourteenth century was a time of social and political upheaval.

The Church, over-rich and over-powerful for her own good, had become terribly corrupt. The fact that great offices of state were held by bishops meant, of necessity, that more and more of their purely ecclesiastical work was delegated to subordinates. In the ten years between 1376-86, out of twenty-five bishops no fewer than thirteen held secular offices of importance. William of Wykeham was appointed Chancellor of England and Bishop of the great diocese of Winchester in the same month. Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, led the English army in Flanders. No wonder that the power of the archdeacons, the _oculi episcopi_, increased tenfold. They frequently exercised authority in the bishop's court, and in those days the powers of ecclesiastical courts were considerable and their jurisdiction was wide. The sketch which prefaces the _Freres Tale_ was probably drawn from the life:--

Whilom ther was dwellinge in my contree An erchedeken, a man of heigh degree

For smale tythes and for smal offringe He made the peple pitously to singe.

For er the bisshop caughte hem with his hook, They weren in the erchedekenes book.

Add to this the fact that one in three of the archdeacons holding office in England at this time were foreigners, and it is easy to see how much ill-feeling was likely to be stirred up between them and the laity. Nor were the parish priests much better. The black death, which ravaged Europe from time to time, had swept across England with peculiar fury in 1348.

Hundreds of the n.o.blest and best of the clergy, who stayed gallantly by their flocks, had been swept away. There were not enough priests to administer the sacraments of the Church, and between this urgent necessity for ministers to bury the dead, to baptise and marry, and the fact that many of the richer livings had fallen into the hands of foreigners, who cared nothing for the peasants committed to their charge, or of the great Abbeys, which were ready enough to appoint some illiterate boor, just able to stumble through his office, to act as their deputy at a nominal salary, it is small wonder that crying abuses came into existence. "They have parish churches," writes Wycliff, "apropered to worldly rich bishops and abbots that have many thousand marks more than enow.... And yet they do not the office of curates, neither in teaching or preaching or giving of sacraments nor of receiving poor men in the parish: but setten an idiot for vicar or parish priest that cannot and may not do the office of a good curate, and yet the poor parish findeth him." Chaucer finds it among the striking virtues of his poor Parson that:--

He sette nat his benefice to hyre, And leet his sheep encombred in the myre, And ran to London, un-to seynt Poules To seken him a chaunterie for soules,[169]

Or with a bretherhed to been withholde; But dwelte at hoom, and kepte wel his folde....

and that he does not attempt to wring their last penny from his unfortunate parishioners:--

Ful looth were him to cursen for his tythes.[170]

Matters were further complicated by the wandering friars who recognised no jurisdiction save that of the Pope himself, and who, having fallen far from the n.o.ble ideal of poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience, set by their founders, took unscrupulous advantage of the ignorance and superst.i.tion of the people, and, like the pardoners, often undermined the authority of the parish priests. The custom of commuting penance for a payment in money was spreading, and naturally opened the door to abuses of all kinds.

No wonder that Wycliff arose to thunder against these malpractices, and that his poor preachers gained such a following. It was not, in the majority of cases, that people had any quarrel with the doctrines of the Church--the number of recantations and paucity of martyrs among the early Lollards show that it was not doctrine that they wished to reform--but injustice and oppression were inevitably arousing a widespread, smouldering discontent which broke into flame now at this point, now at that. As we read the history of the time, we marvel at the patience and good-humour of the inhabitants of Merry England.

How far Chaucer was in sympathy with the Lollards it is difficult to say.

His works contain but the barest reference to their existence, and the fact that the Host accuses the Parson of Lollardy, and that the Shipman expresses a pious horror of heresy, cannot be said to prove anything either way. It may be intended as a carefully concealed compliment to the influence of Wycliff, or, as seems more probable, it may simply be a chance reference in keeping with the spirit of the times. That the Shipman should be so terrified lest the saintly Parson should

... springen c.o.kkel in our clene corn,[171]

that he feels impelled to break into his threatened sermon with the story of the merchant's wife and the monk, is a subtle enough piece of satire, but whether Chaucer so intended it, or whether it is one of the happy accidents of genius, we have no means of knowing. The Parson is a devout Catholic, the Monk, with all his faults, is at worst but a forerunner of the fox-hunting squarson of later days, with all the geniality and good-fellowship of his race. If Chaucer attacks the clergy, it is only for those things which the best Churchmen of the day were denouncing with less wit but no less bitterness. Saints are rare at the best of times, and Chaucer, whose mission is to paint life as he finds it, gives good measure when he allows the Parson and the Plowman to form two of his nine-and-twenty pilgrims.

Few things, indeed, are more striking in Chaucer than the manner in which he combines caustic observation of the weaknesses and hypocrisies of men, with innate reverence for all that is pure and n.o.ble. That the same man should enjoy the coa.r.s.e humour of the Friar and the Reve, and yet treat womanhood and childhood with such tender reverence, is one of the mysteries of human nature. Prof. Ten Brink, as has been said, believes that Chaucer pa.s.sed through a phase of intense religious feeling. "A worldling has to reproach himself with all sorts of things," he writes, "especially when he lives at a court like that of Edward III and is intimate with a John of Gaunt. Chaucer ... naturally seeks in religion the power for self-conquest and improvement. He was a faithful son of the Church, even though he had his own opinions about many things.... He was specially attracted by the eternal-womanly element in this system, which finds its purest realisation in the person of the Virgin Mother Mary. In moments when life seemed hard and weary, and when he was unable to arouse and cheer himself with philosophy and poetry, he gladly turned for help and consolation to the Virgin Mother." Certainly his poetry is never sweeter or more dignified than when he is addressing this "haven of refut," this

... salvacioun Of hem that been in sorwe and in distresse.

Nothing better ill.u.s.trates the simplicity and sincerity of Chaucer's religious feeling, than the tale of little St. Hugh. The story of the Christian child decoyed away and murdered by the Jews was commonly believed in the Middle Ages. Indeed, it is said that more than one anti-Semitic outbreak in Russia during the past forty years has been provoked by the relation of similar tales, and we have just seen the conclusion of a "Blood-ritual" case of the kind. The fierce racial and religious hatred which underlies belief in the possibility of such a thing, is in itself sufficiently terrible, and the story affords ample opportunity for the expression of animosity towards these

... cursed folk of Herodes al newe,

but Chaucer's religion would appear to consist less in the denunciation of the Church's enemies, than in affection for her saints. Dramatic justice is meted out to the murderers, but the poet takes no delight in dwelling on their dying agonies, or heaping abuse upon their memory. The point of the tale lies, not in the wickedness of the Jews, but in the simple, childish innocence and piety of Hugh, and the manner in which "Cristes moder" deigns to honour the service of this

... litel clergeon[172] of seven yeer of age.

The opening invocation is one of the most beautiful of all Chaucer's addresses to the Virgin:--

Lady! thy bountee, thy magnificence, Thy vertu, and thy grete humilitee Ther may no tonge expresse in no science; For som-tyme, lady, er men praye to thee, Thou goost biforn, of thy benignitee, And getest us the light, thurgh thy preyers, To gyden us un-to thy sone so dere.

From beginning to end the limpid simplicity of the poem is marred by no unnecessary word. The picture of the little boy doing his diligence to learn the _Alma redemptoris_, although

Noght wiste he what this Latin was to seye For he so yong and tendre was of age,

and going to his school-fellow to have it explained, is absolutely natural. So is the school-fellow's hasty summary of the hymn, ending with

"I can no more expounde in this matere; I lerne song, I can[173] but smal grammere."

Chaucer does not, like so many hagiographers, forget the child in the saint. The prevailing note throughout is one of happy childhood. The tragedy is kept in the background. We catch a glimpse of the cruel steel as the Jews cut the boy's throat: we see the white-faced mother hastening from place to place in search of him; but our thoughts are with St. Hugh and the gracious Queen of Heaven who comes to aid him:--

And in a tombe of marbul-stones clere Enclosen they his litel body swete; Ther he is now, G.o.d leve us for to mete.[174]

There is no tendency to over-elaborate the miracle or to explain it away.

Chaucer accepts the fact quietly and without comment, as he accepts the miracles in the _Man of Lawes Tale_. In the story of Constance, indeed, it would seem as if some momentary doubt of its possibility flashed across his mind, for he goes out of his way to defend the miraculous element, but the defence itself is one of simple acceptance of facts related in the Bible, and shows none of that intellectual questioning which sometimes manifests itself in his poetry:--