The Common Reader
little landscapes, to birds’ nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn
to the life. The wider landscape is lost.
But to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be altogether
agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful experience of
their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and the
jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the gay and definite.
Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in word-painting which is
the modern inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even, when we
come to look, without a single word of direct description, the sense of
the open air.
And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge
—that is enough.
Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy faces,
or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes, therefore,
disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with the
hardness and the freshness of an actual presence. Soon, however, we
notice something of greater importance than the gay and picturesque
appearance of the mediaeval world—the solidity which plumps it out, the
conviction which animates the characters. There is immense variety in
the _Canterbury Tales_, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent
type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young
women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know
them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl,
and this is what she looks like:
Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,
Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her
virginity:
I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.
Next he bethinks him how
Discreet she was in answering alway;
And though she had been as wise as Pallas
No countrefeted termes hadde she
To seme wys; but after hir degree
She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse
Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.
Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale, but they
are parts, one feels, of the same personage, whom he had in mind,
perhaps unconsciously, when he thought of a young girl, and for this
reason, as she goes in and out of the _Canterbury Tales_ bearing
different names, she has a stability which is only to be found where the
poet has made up his mind about young women, of course, but also about
the world they live in, its end, its nature, and his own craft and
technique, so that his mind is free to apply its force fully to its
object. It does not occur to him that his Griselda might be improved or
altered. There is no blur about her, no hesitation; she proves nothing;
she is content to be herself. Upon her, therefore, the mind can rest
with that unconscious ease which allows it, from hints and suggestions,
to endow her with many more qualities than are actually referred to.
Such is the power of conviction, a rare gift, a gift shared in our day
by Joseph Conrad in his earlier novels, and a gift of supreme
importance, for upon it the whole weight of the building depends. Once
believe in Chaucer’s young men and women and we have no need of
preaching or protest. We know what he finds good, what evil; the less
said the better. Let him get on with his story, paint knights and
squires, good women and bad, cooks, shipmen, priests, and we will supply
the landscape, give his society its belief, its standing towards life
and death, and make of the journey to Canterbury a spiritual pilgrimage.
This simple faithfulness to his own conceptions was easier then than now
in one respect at least, for Chaucer could write frankly where we must
either say nothing or say it slyly. He could sound every note in the
language instead of finding a great many of the best gone dumb from
disuse, and thus, when struck by daring fingers, giving off a loud
discordant jangle out of keeping with the rest. Much of Chaucer—a few
lines perhaps in each of the Tales—is improper and gives us as we read
it the strange sensation of being naked to the air after being muffled
in old clothing. And, as a certain kind of humour depends upon being
able to speak without self-consciousness of the parts and functions of
the body, so with the advent of decency literature lost the use of one
of its limbs. It lost its power to create the Wife of Bath, Juliet’s
nurse, and their recognisable though already colourless relation, Moll
Flanders. Sterne, from fear of coarseness, is forced into indecency. He
must be witty, not humorous. He must hint instead of speaking outright.
Nor can we believe, with Mr. Joyce’s _Ulysses_ before us, that laughter
of the old kind will ever be heard again.
But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me
Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.
Unto this day it doth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
The sound of that old woman’s voice is still.
But there is another and more important reason for the surprising
brightness, the still effective merriment of the _Canterbury Tales_.
Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being
lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its
dung, its cocks and its hens is not (we have come to think) a poetic
subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to
require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of
mythological origin. But Chaucer says outright:
Three large sowes hadde she, and namo,
Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle;
or again,
A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute
With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute.
He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get close up to his
object—an old man’s chin—
With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte,
Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere;
or an old man’s neck—
The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh
Whyl that he sang;
and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what
they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this
very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without
dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of the Greeks or the
Romans, it is only that his story leads him there. He has no desire to
wrap himself round in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or to shirk the
associations of common grocer’s English.
Therefore when we say that we know the end of the journey, it is hard to
quote the particular lines from which we take our knowledge. He fixed
his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world to come. He was
little given to abstract contemplation. He deprecated, with peculiar
archness, any competition with the scholars and divines:
The answere of this I lete to divynis,
But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is.
What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in the colde grave
Allone, withouten any companye,
he asks, or ponders
O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your worde eterne,
And wryten in the table of athamaunt
Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,
What is mankinde more un-to yow holde
Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?
Questions press upon him; he asks questions, but he is too true a poet
to answer them; he leaves them unsolved, uncramped by the solution of
the moment, thus fresh for the generations that come after him. In his
life, too, it would be impossible to write him down a man of this party
or of that, a democrat or an aristocrat. He was a staunch churchman, but
he laughed at priests. He was an able public servant and a courtier, but
his views upon sexual morality were extremely lax. He sympathised with
poverty, but did nothing to improve the lot of the poor. It is safe to
say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another
because of anything that Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him,
we are of course absorbing morality at every pore. For among writers
there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and
lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed
their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the
world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are among the priests; they give us
text after text to be hung upon the wall, saying after saying to be laid
upon the heart like an amulet against disaster—
Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone
He prayeth best that loveth best
All things both great and small
—such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly. But
Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary
people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other.
We see them eating, drinking, laughing, and making love, and come to
feel without a word being said what their standards are and so are
steeped through and through with their morality. There can be no more
forcible preaching than this where all actions and passions are
represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray
and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves. It is the morality of
ordinary intercourse, the morality of the novel, which parents and
librarians rightly judge to be far more persuasive than the morality of
poetry.
And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without a word being said the
criticism is complete; what we are saying, thinking, reading, doing has
been commented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense, powerful
though that is, of having been in good company and got used to the ways
of good society. For as we have jogged through the real, the unadorned
country-side, with first one good fellow cracking his joke or singing
his song and then another, we know that though this world resembles, it
is not in fact our daily world. It is the world of poetry. Everything
happens here more quickly and more intensely, and with better order than
in life or in prose; there is a formal elevated dullness which is part
of the incantation of poetry; there are lines speaking half a second in
advance what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts before
words cumbered them; and lines which we go back to read again with that
heightened quality, that enchantment which keeps them glittering in the
mind long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place, and its
variety and divagations ordered by the power which is among the most
impressive of all—the shaping power, the architect’s power. It is the
peculiarity of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once this
quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by quotation. From most
poets quotation is easy and obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers;
some passage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very equal, very
even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we take six or seven lines in the
hope that the quality will be contained in them it has escaped.
My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place,
Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede,
And richely me cladden, o your grace
To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede,
But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.
In its place that seemed not only memorable and moving but fit to set
beside striking beauties. Cut out and taken separately it appears
ordinary and quiet. Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most
ordinary words and the simplest feelings when laid side by side make
each other shine; when separated lose their lustre. Thus the pleasure he