Chapter 4 - Chaucer
I
The Romance of the Rose is one of the most ‘successful’ books, in the vulgar sense, that have ever been written. It exists in 300 manuscripts; it was paraphrased and moralized in prose; it was ‘answered’; it was translated or imitated in German, English, and Italian; and Agrippa d’Aubigny in the seventeenth century still speaks of it as an admired work. The poems that derive from it constitute the most important literary phenomenon of the later Middle Ages. As a germinal book during these centuries it ranks second to none except the Bible and the Consolation of Philosophy.
But all this can easily be misunderstood. The Roman is not the first of any long series of poems essentially similar to itself. On the contrary, few, if any, attempted to do over again what Guillaume de Lorris had done—that is, to represent an action or story of love in a thoroughgoing allegory. Thoroughgoing allegories we shall find in plenty, but they do not deal, or do not deal exclusively, with love. Again, we shall find love poems, but these will be often but superficially allegorical or not allegorical at all. The elements into which the Roman can be analysed are constantly used by later poets: the gracious, yet frank, eroticism, the opening with a dream, the allegory, the satire against women and the Church, the encyclopedic didacticism; but these are hardly ever found in just such combination as the Romance of the Rose displays, nor with the same result. That is why we are justified in speaking of it as a germinal book. It is not a dead thing, a model to be imitated; it is a parent, begetting offspring at once like and unlike itself, and each new child has his individual traits as well as his family likeness.
The rest of this book will be concerned with the English branch of this literary family, and I shall touch on foreign literatures only in so far as these bear on our native development. Our starting-point will naturally be the fourteenth century, for it was then that the fully developed sentiment of courtly love, embodied in allegory, first made its effective appearance in England. A full history either of English allegory, or of English love poetry, would have to begin much farther back; but even Bernard the monk did not see all, and it is time to turn to our own great poets of the fourteenth century.
The greatest English allegory of this period falls a little outside our subject. I relinquish Piers Plowman with the less regret because I leave it in better hands than mine; my only anxiety is lest, by passing it over, I may seem to place it in a false isolation from the literature of the period, and thus to confirm certain misunderstandings. Scholars more interested in social history than in poetry have sometimes made this poem appear much less ordinary than it really is as regards its kind, and much less extraordinary as regards the genius of the poet. In fact, its only oddity is its excellence; in Piers Plowman we see an exceptional poet adorning a species of poetry which is hardly exceptional at all. He is writing a moral poem, such as Gower’s Miroir de l’homme or Gower’s Prologue to the Confessio Amantis, and throwing in, as any other medieval poet might have done, a good deal of satire on various ‘estates’. His satire falls heaviest where we should expect it to fall—on idle beggars, hypocritical churchmen, and oppressors. Like Chaucer he reverences knighthood. Even as a moralist he has no unique or novel ‘message’ to deliver. As a cure for all our ills he can offer us only the old story—do-wel, do-bet, and do-best. His advice is as ancient, as ‘conventional’, if you will, as that of Socrates; not to mention names more august. It is doubtful whether any moralist of unquestioned greatness has ever attempted more (or less) than the defence of the universally acknowledged; for ‘men more frequently require to be reminded than informed’. As a politician, Langland has nothing to propose except that all estates should do their duty. It is unnecessary, I presume, to state that his poem is not revolutionary, nor even democratic. It is not even ‘popular’ in any very obvious sense. A poem every way unsuitable for recitation cannot have been addressed to those who could not read; and any one who supposes that Langland had in view an audience very different from the audience of Gower and Chaucer may be advised to imagine the probable results of reading aloud in a tavern or on a village green such lines as the following:
The whiles I quykke the corps, quod he, called am I Anima;
And whan I wilne and wolde, Animus ich hatte;
And for that I can and knowe, called am I Mens;
And whan I make mone to God, Memoria is my name.
Or, if he prefers,
Thus is relacion rect ryht as adiective and substantif
Acordeth in alle kyndes with his antecedent.
Langland is a learned poet. He writes for clerks and for clerky minded gentlemen. The forty-five manuscripts, and the presence of quotation from Langland in Usk’s Testament of Love, prove that he did not write in vain. It would have been strange if he had. He offered to his educated contemporaries fare of a kind which they well understood. His excellent satiric comedy, as displayed in the behaviour of the seven Deadly Sins belongs to a tradition as old as the Ancren Riwle; and his allegorical form and pious content were equally familiar.
What is truly exceptional about Langland is the kind, and the degree, of his poetic imagination. His comedy, however good, is not what is most characteristic about him. Sublimity—so rare in Gower, and rarer still in Chaucer—is frequent in Piers Plowman. The Harrowing of Hell, so often and so justly praised, is but one instance. There is not much medieval poetry that does not look pale if we set it beside such lines as these:
Kinde huyrde tho Conscience, and cam out of the planetes
And sente forth his foreyours, fevers and fluxes—
Ther was ‘Harow!’ and ‘Help! Here cometh kynde,
With Deth that is dredful to undo us alle!’
The Lord that lyuede after lust, tho aloude criede
After Comfort, a knyght, to come and bere hus baner.
‘Alarme, alarme!’ quath that Lord, ‘eche lyf kepe hus owene!’
In a quieter mood, the great vision wherein the poet beholds ‘the sea, and the sun, and the sand after’ and sees ‘man and his make’ among the other creatures, is equally distinctive. There is in it a Lucretian largeness which, in that age, no one but Langland attempts. It is far removed from the common, and beautiful, descriptions of nature which we find in medieval poetry—the merry morning and the singing birds; it is almost equally far from the sterner landscapes of Gawain and the Greene Knight. It belongs rather to what has been called the ‘intellectual imagination’; the unity and vastness were attained by thought, rather than by sense, but they end by being a true image and no mere conception. This power of rendering imaginable what before was only intelligible is nowhere, I think, not even in Dante, better exemplified than in Langland’s lines on the Incarnation. They are, so far as I know, perfectly accurate and clear in doctrine; and the result is as concrete, as fully incarnate, as if the poet were writing about apples or butter:
Love is the plonte of pees and most preciouse of vertues;
For hevene holde hit ne myƷte so hevy hit semede,
Til hit hadde on erthe Ʒoten hym-selue.
Was never lef upon lynde lyghter ther-after,
As whanne hit hadde of the folde flesch and blode ytake.
Tho was it portatyf and pershaunt as the poynt of a nelde.
Doubtless such heights are rare in Langland, as they are rare in poetry at all; but the man who attains them is a very great poet. He is not, indeed, the greatest poet of his century. He lacks the variety of Chaucer, and Chaucer’s fine sense of language: he is confused and monotonous, and hardly makes his poetry into a poem. But he can do some things which Chaucer cannot, and he can rival Chaucer in Chaucer’s special excellence of pathos.
II
For many historians of literature, and for all general readers, the great mass of Chaucer’s work is simply a background to the Canterbury Tales, and the whole output of the fourteenth century is simply a background to Chaucer. Whether such a view is just, or whether it has causes other than the excellence of the Tales, need not here be inquired; for us, at any rate, Chaucer is a poet of courtly love, and he ceases to be relevant to our study when he reaches the last and most celebrated of his works. Nor does he stand, for us, in isolation from his century; he stands side by side with Gower and the translators of the Romance of the Rose—of whom, he himself was one—and co-operates with them in the work of assimilating the achievements of French poetry, and thus determining the direction of English poetry for nearly two hundred years.
By considering Chaucer in this light we shall lose much; but we shall have the advantage of seeing him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and to his immediate successors. When the men of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries thought of Chaucer, they did not think first of the Canterbury Tales. Their Chaucer was the Chaucer of dream and allegory, of love-romance and erotic debate, of high style and profitable doctrine. To Deschamps, as every one remembers, he was the ‘great translator’—the gardener by whom a French poet might hope to be transplanted—and also the English god of Love. To Gower, he is the poet of Venus: to Thomas Usk, Love’s ‘owne trewe servaunt’ and ‘the noble philosophical poete’. In the age that followed the names of Gower and Chaucer are constantly coupled. Chaucer’s comic and realistic style is imitated by Lydgate in the Prologue to the Book of Thebes, and by an unknown poet in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn; but this is a small harvest beside the innumerable imitations of his amatory and allegorical poetry. And while his successors thus show their admiration for his love poetry, they explicitly praise him as the great model of style. He is to them much what Waller and Denham were to the Augustans, the ‘firste finder’ of the true way in our language, which before his time was ‘rude and boystous’. Where we see a great comedian and a profound student of human character, they saw a master of noble sentiment and a source of poetic diction.
It is tempting to say that if Chaucer’s friends and followers were dunces who treasured the chaff and neglected the grain, yet this is no reason why we should do likewise. But the temptation should be resisted. To grow impatient with the critical tradition of the earliest lovers of Chaucer is to exclude ourselves from any understanding of the later Middle Ages in England; for the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is based (naturally enough) not on our reading of Chaucer, but on theirs. And there is something to be said for them.
In the first place, we must beware of condemning them for not working the vein which Chaucer had opened up in the Canterbury Tales, lest in so doing we condemn the whole course of English poetry. What they have left undone, their successors have left undone likewise. The Canterbury Tales are glorious reading, but they have always been sterile. If the later Middle Ages can offer us only the Prologue to Thebes and the Prologue to Beryn, we ourselves are not in much better plight. William Morris’s discipleship to Chaucer was an illusion. Crabbe and Mr. Masefield are good writers; but they are hardly among the greatest English poets. If Chaucer’s Tales have had any influence, it is to be sought in our prose rather than in our verse. Our great and characteristic poets—our Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and the like—have much more in common with Virgil, or even with Beowulf, than with the Prologue and the Pardoners Tale. Perhaps none of our early poets has so little claim to be called the father of English poetry as the Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales.
But even if the first Chaucerians were dunces, it would not be safe to neglect their testimony. The stupidest contemporary, we may depend upon it, knew certain things about Chaucer’s poetry which modern scholarship will never know; and doubtless the best of us misunderstand Chaucer in many places where the veriest fool among his audience could not have misunderstood. If they all took Chaucer’s love poetry au grand sérieux, it is overwhelmingly probable that Chaucer himself did the same; and one of the advantages of keeping the Canterbury Tales out of sight, as I have proposed to do, will be that we may thus hope to rid ourselves of a false emphasis which is creeping into the criticism of Chaucer. We have heard a little too much of the ‘mocking’ Chaucer. Not many will agree with the critic who supposed that the laughter of Troilus in heaven was ‘ironical’; but I am afraid that many of us now read into Chaucer all manner of ironies, slynesses, and archnesses, which are not there, and praise him for his humour where he is really writing with ‘ful devout corage’. The lungs of our generation are so very ‘tickle o’ the sere’.
There is one respect in which the severest critic will admit that the old Chaucerians were right; that is, in their recognition of Chaucer as a great model of poetical style. It is true that the Chaucerian style, imitated ill, and with gross exaggeration of its foreign and polysyllabic elements, may have been one of the sources of the later ‘aureate’ style, which, along with some beauties, has many vices. But Chaucer is not to blame for this. The history of his influence on the fifteenth century is closely parallel to that of Milton’s on the eighteenth; in each we see the work of a great poet partially vulgarized, and hardened into a mannerism, by indiscreet imitation. The original style is to be judged on its own merits; and it is one of the pleasures of studying Chaucer to trace its development. That development is from a style essentially prosaic and yet pretentious, to a style which has since become almost the norm of English poetry. Examples will make all plain:
To speke of goodnesse: trewly she
Had as moche debonairte
As ever had Hester in the bible,
And more, if more were possible.
And soth to seyne therwith-al
She had a wit so general,
So hool enclyned to alle gode,
That al hir wit was set, by the rode,
Withoute malice, upon gladnesse.
This is the old, bad manner. A man could forgive, as mere honest debility, the lumber of expletives—‘as ever had Hester’—‘and more if more were possible’—‘by the rode’; what is radically bad is the fussy prolixity, the air of saying so much while so little is said, the pseudo-legal or pseudo-logical pretentiousness. ‘To speke of goodnesse’, he begins; like a lecturer turning to a new head. ‘She had a wit so general’, he continues; and who would not expect that some real consequence was coming? Such a style makes the worst of both worlds: it is as heavy as the prose of instruction, and as empty as an Elizabethan song, while yet it neither sings nor instructs. It is a style which Lydgate in his worst places may be said to have brought to its own terrible perfection. To turn from such a passage to the preludings of the new style is like passing from the engine-room of a ship to the deck.
Gladeth, ye foules, of the morwe gray,
Lo!—Venus risen among yon rowes rede;
And floures fresshe, honoureth ye this day . . .
Through Phebus, that was comen hastely
Within the paleys-yates sturdely
With torche in honde, of which the streymes brighte
On Venus chambre knokkeden ful lighte.
And then at erst hath he
Al his desyr, and ther-with al mischaunce.
But Chaucer’s conversion is gradual, and in the same poem he can suddenly plunge us back into the old manner at its very worst—
The ordre of compleynt requireth skilfully
That if a wight shal pleyne pitously,
Ther mot be cause wherfor that men pleyne, &c.
which is sheer nonentity yawning in thirty syllables. Even in the Parlement of Foules, side by side with the calculated and comic prosiness of the goose, we find the unintentionally and unjustifiably prosaic verbiage of
Foules of ravyne
Han chosen first by pleyn eleccioun
The tercelet of the faucon, to diffyne
Al hir sentence and as him list termyne.
It seems ungracious to hunt out the faults of a great poet. But Chaucer’s achievement in style cannot be understood, cannot be praised so sincerely as contemporaries praised it, until we realize the depth from which he raised himself, and, at times, raised his disciples also.
The form and sentiment of Chaucer’s love poems well illustrate what I said at the beginning of this chapter about the living and therefore ever-changing influence of the Romance of the Rose. They are all recognizable descendants of it, but none of them is a poem of the same type. Nowhere in Chaucer do we find what can be called a radically allegorical poem. The point is of some importance; for it is in Chaucer that many readers make their first acquaintance with allegory, and Chaucer thus becomes the innocent cause of a deep-seated misunderstanding. By a radical allegory I mean a story which can be translated into literal narration, as I translated the first part of the Romance of the Rose in the preceding chapter, without confusion, but not without loss. Thus, if there is no story—if the literal version, when extracted, proves to be a mere maxim or description, and not the ‘imitation of an action’, then the work in question does not pass my test. If, again, there are passages which cannot be so ‘translated’—episodes for which no significacio can be found—then, again, it fails. Still more if there are passages which need no translation, being already literal in the original text, then the original is to that extent unallegorical. Above all, if we lose nothing by our ‘translation’, the original work must be bad. If the story, literally told, pleases as much as the original, and in the same way, to what purpose was allegory employed? For the function of allegory is not to hide but to reveal, and it is properly used only for that which cannot be said, or so well said, in literal speech. The inner life, and specially the life of love, religion, and spiritual adventure, has therefore always been the field of true allegory; for here there are intangibles which only allegory can fix and reticences which only allegory can overcome. The poem of Guillaume de Lorris is a true allegory of love; but no poem of Chaucer’s is. In Chaucer we find the same subject-matter, that of chivalrous love; but the treatment is never truly allegorical. Traces of the allegorical poem survive. Thus we have poems set in the framework of a dream after the manner of Guillaume; but what happens in the dream is not allegorical. Or we have allegory itself used as a framework for something else. We have allegorical persons, each with a brief description, used as a kind of pageantry to decorate a background, in the Renaissance manner; or again we have personifications which have become a mere characteristic of style, a form of poetic diction, after the manner of the eighteenth century. Finally, in his greatest work, we have the courtly conceptions of love, which Chaucer learned from the French allegory, put into action in poetry which is not allegorical at all. Chaucer achieves the literal presentation; but it is Guillaume’s allegory which has rendered the achievement possible.
The Compleynt unto Pite and the Compleynt to His Lady illustrate the use of personification at its lowest level—the most faint and frigid result of the popularity of allegory. Not only do the allegorical figures fail to interact, as in a true allegory; they even fail to be pictorial: they become a mere catalogue:
And fresshe Beautee, Lust and Iolitee,
Assured Maner, Youthe, and Honestee,
Wisdom, Estaat, Dreed, and Governaunce.
—where it is not only the cadence of the last line that reminds us of Lydgate.
In the Book of the Duchesse we have the poem framed in a dream, and we have courtly love; but allegory has disappeared. We dream in order to hear a bereaved lover give just such a literal account of his past happiness and present sorrow as he might have given in waking life. The dream is not, however, useless to Chaucer. It casts over his conversation with the lover a certain remoteness, it transfers the responsibility for what was said from his waking self to the vagaries of dream, and thus renders possible a more intimate picture of his patron’s loss than would have been seemly on any other terms. But it would be rash to assume that Chaucer consciously chose it with this in view. The use of the dream for all sorts of purposes which hardly seem to justify it, and even for elegy, appears to have been a device of the French poets, and I think that Chaucer followed it chiefly because he enjoyed it. Machaut had already shown how a poetic dream could be made much more like a dream than Guillaume de Lorris had attempted to make it; and Chaucer, delighted, as any good workman must be delighted, with the task of capturing the most elusive, yet familiar, of experiences, has probably bettered his model. His ‘dream psychology’ has been described as ‘flawless’. Our own concern is naturally more with his psychology of love, for it is in this that Chaucer shows at once his own genius and his faithful discipleship to the Rose tradition. In this poem the bereaved lover has passed through all the same phases as the dreamer in the Roman: that he has passed also through one more is his tragedy. At first, like the dreamer, he had wandered unattached though in the garden of love,
And this was longe, and many a year
Or that myn herte was set o-wher,
That I did thus and niste why;
I throwe hit cam me kindely.
He knows well enough, however, who really sits as portress at the garden gate,
For that tyme youthe, my maistresse
Governed me in ydelnesse.
When, at length, he falls in love, it is because he has looked into the well of Narcissus,
I ne took
No maner counseyl but at hir look
And at myn herte: for why hir eyen
So gladly, I trow, myn herte seyen.
When he first attempts to approach the rose, however, he is repulsed and driven to lament on the wrong side of the thorny hedge. In all this Chaucer agrees with the tradition, but he is not therefore ‘conventional’ in the bad sense of the word. How fine and fresh his treatment is may be judged from the very remarkable fact that though the poem is a true elegy, yet the abiding impression it leaves upon us is one of health and happiness. There is no concealment of the loss: the pain rings true in—
Farwel, swete, y-wis
And farwel al that ever ther is,
and in the mourner’s return upon himself (anticipating Lycidas) when he calls back his fruitless wish—‘And though, where-to?’ But Chaucer’s praise of the dead and his picture of the happiness that has been lost are so potent that we remember them when everything else in the poem is forgotten. Successful panegyric is the rarest of all literary achievements, and Chaucer has compassed it. I believe in the ‘gode faire Whyte’, as I have never believed in Edward King, or Arthur Hallam, or Clough. I seem to have seen her ‘laughe and pley so womanly’ and to have heard ‘which a goodly softe speche’ she uttered; and now that she is dead I seem to realize with more poignancy how ‘hir liste so wel to live that dulnesse was of hir a-drad’. Not because the poem is a bad elegy, but because it is a good one, the black background of death is always disappearing behind these iridescent shapes of satisfied love; and because of these, all its attendant imagery—the harmony of birds, the sun just rising in the ‘blew, bright, clere’ air, the glades starry with flowers that have forgotten winter’s poverty and alive with happy animals—all these have a symbolic fitness that is beyond the contract of conscious allegory. If the poem has any faults, apart from its occasional lapses in style and metre, they arise from Chaucer’s anxiety to do better than he is yet able. Thus he has the happy idea of trying to show dramatically in his dialogue the impatient self-absorption of grief on the part of the lover, and his demands on the dreamer’s close attention. But he does this so clumsily that he sometimes makes the one seem a bore, and the other a fool, thus producing comic effects which are disastrous, and which were certainly not intended.
From the Compleynt of Mars I have already quoted lines that illustrate the growth of Chaucer’s poetic style; and when we have noticed these, we have, perhaps, given this poem all the attention it deserves. The astronomical allusions are, I confess, too hard for me: the topical allegory is now difficult to recover and hardly worth recovering. The relation of mistress and lover in what was then conceived to be its normal or healthy condition is well described in the lines
And thus she brydeleth him in hir manere
With nothing but with scourging of hir chere.
The poem is otherwise remarkable because it contains, agreeably with the example of Jean de Meun, a hint of the opposite point of view. One stanza which is put into the mouth of Mars draws the contrast between Divine and earthly love, apparently to the advantage of the former. But we are now prepared for such losses of confidence at the end, or even in the midst, of an amorous poem.
The Balade to Rosemounde is interesting for two reasons. The first stanza shows Chaucer’s style at the point where it approaches most nearly to the aureate style of his successors. The third stanza presents a problem. Is this ‘pyk walwed in galauntyne’ intended to be comic or not? The modern reader is tempted to reply at once in the affirmative, but I feel no confidence. The conception of the ‘mocking’ Chaucer must not be so used as to render it impossible for us to say Chaucer ever wrote ill—which is what follows if everything that cannot please as poetry is immediately set down as humour. And what will be very funny if it is meant to be serious, may often be very feeble as a deliberate joke. The pike is a case in point. As serious poetry it is bathos: as jest it is flat. What effect Chaucer intended is just one of those things which, as I conceive, we shall never know, but which Gower or Scogan or John of Gaunt would have known at once and without question.
Passing over the ambitious and soon abandoned Anelida, and the exquisite Merciles Beautee (where the comic intention of the palinode is not doubtful), I come to the masterpiece among Chaucer’s early poems, the Parlement of Foules. The occasion and purport of this work have been the subject of a good deal of discussion. The occasion, if discovered, would be but an ‘unconcerning thing’, a ‘matter of fact’. There is, indeed, no necessity to assume any such external stimulus as a royal or noble marriage for the Parlement. The species to which the poem belongs—the debate on a hard question of love—is a familiar one. Two of Machaut’s poems are jugements; and in earlier French poetry—not to mention our own Owl and Nightingale—birds had already debated. What concerns us much more is the dispute about the purport or tendency—the emotional and imaginative upshot—of the poem as a whole. It is here that the exaggerated conception of the ‘mocking’ Chaucer has produced its most disastrous results. Critics have been found to support the view that Chaucer—now herkeneth which a reson I will bring—wrote the Parlement in order to ridicule the courtly sentiment of the nobler birds through the criticism of ‘the lewednes behinde’. It would almost be better to miss every joke in Chaucer than to believe that the Goose and the Duck are his spokesmen, and the Turtle and the Eagles his butt. I will not insist on my conviction that to believe thus is to attribute to Chaucer a square-headed vulgarity of thought and feeling which would be regrettable in any age and all but impossible to a court poet of the age of Froissart: all may not share that conviction. But surely this view is based on a misunderstanding of the whole procedure of medieval love poetry? The courtly sentiment is, from the outset, an escape, a truancy, alike from vulgar common sense and from the ten commandments. Chrétien, and Guillaume de Lorris, and every one else had always known that Reason was on the other side. Yet the truancy is felt to be, in some flawed and fragile way, a noble thing: the source of every virtue except chastity, the ‘flemer’ of every vice save one. Hence those strange comings and goings in every medieval love-book. The delicate dream protects itself against moral or common-sensible attack by every kind of concession and tergiversation—by ambiguities in the sense of the word Love, as in Gower’s Prologue, by a blending of love earthly and love heavenly as in Dante, or (less successfully) in Thomas Usk, by direct palinode, as in Andreas. Above all it protects itself against the laughter of the vulgar—that is, of all of us in certain moods—by allowing laughter and cynicism their place inside the poem; as some politicians hold that the only way to make a revolutionary safe is to give him a seat in Parliament. The Duck and Goose have their seats in Chaucer’s Parlement for the same reason; and for the same reason we have satire on women in Andreas, we have the shameless Vekke in the Rose, we have Pandarus in the Book of Troilus, and Dinadan in Malory, and Godfrey Gobelive in Hawes, and the Squire of Dames in the Faerie Queene. Even so, long after the original reasons for the tradition have been forgotten, the homme sensuel moyen with his fair, large ears appears in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Papageno, the child of nature, parallels and, in a sense, parodies, the loves and trials of Tamino. The appearance of such figures in a poem does not mean that the main tendency of the work is satiric: it almost means the opposite. When the soldiers followed Caesar in his triumph singing calvum moechum adducimus, this did not mean that the purpose of a triumph was to ridicule the general. It meant precisely the opposite: the Fescennine license was included as a concession to Nemesis, and Nemesis needed to be placated just because the ceremony as a whole aimed at the glorification of the general. In the same way, the comic figures in a medieval love poem are a cautionary concession—a libation made to the god of lewd laughter precisely because he is not the god whom we are chiefly serving—a sop to Silenus and Priapus lest they should trouble our lofty hymns to Cupid. When this has been understood (and not till then) we may, indeed, safely admit that Chaucer has sympathy with the Goose and the Duck. So had every knight and dame among his listeners. There would be no need to make a concession to the ‘lewd’ point of view if it were not present in the minds of all. Chaucer and his audience knew, better than some know now, that human life is not simple. They were able to think of two things at once. They see the common world outside the charmed circle of courtly love; they also have been in that common world and will be there again; and they let it have its say, its ‘large golee’, for a moment, even amidst their ardours and idealisms.
All this may seem over-subtle. But Chaucer, whatever we may think of him, was not a ‘regular fellow’, un vrai businessman, or a rotarian. He was a scholar, a courtier, and a poet, living in a highly subtle and sophisticated civilization. It is only natural that we, who live in an industrial age, should find difficulties in reading poetry that was written for a scholastic and aristocratic age. We must proceed with caution, lest our thick, rough fingers tear the delicate threads that we are trying to disentangle.
When these confusions have been removed, every reader who loves poetry may safely be left alone with the Parlement of Foules. No such reader will misunderstand the mingling of beauty and comedy in this supremely happy and radiant work—a hearty and realistic comedy, and a beauty without effort or afterthought, like Mozartian music. It is not a radical allegory, by my standard, for it allegorizes no inner action. Its significacio, if extracted, would prove to be a state and not a story. Here, as in the Book of the Duchesse, the old garden of the Rose is used to paint a picture of love itself, of love at rest. If a man will compare the beauties of this garden—the almost imperceptible wind, the darting fish, the rabbits playing in the grass, and the ‘ravishing sweetness’ of stringed instruments—with any literal portrayal of the same thing, he will find out what allegory was made for. This is the kind of symbolism that never grows old. But suddenly, in the middle of the poem, we come on something else. In this matter I may claim to have made (quite accidentally) an imaginative experiment. When I was last reading the Parlement, and came to the description of its various inhabitants, which begins at line 211, I said to myself, ‘Now this is very strange. These are not like Chaucer, nor like the Middle Ages at all. They are mere pageant figures put in for decoration.’ A moment later, I remembered that I was in that part of the poem which is borrowed from Boccaccio.
This little story, on my bare word, is naturally not offered as a proof of anything; but it may serve to direct the reader’s attention to something of importance. Boccaccio’s Cupid, Pleasaunce, Beautee, Peace, Priapus, and the rest are Renaissance allegory, not medieval allegory. They are neither, on the one hand, a mere catalogue (like the abstractions in Chaucer’s Compleynts); nor are they true incarnations of inner experience, like the characters of the Romance of the Rose. They have nothing to do, but each has his little bit of description and his recognizable emblems. They are pure decoration—things to be carved on a mantelpiece, or pulled along the streets in a pageant, ‘posed’ each in his cart with anchors, scales, and other apparatus. They are pretty enough, but they have given the word ‘allegory’ a meaning from which it will, perhaps, never recover—with what injustice to certain great poets, it is one purpose of this book to show. And the odd thing is that Chaucer does not seem to be aware of the difference. He is too true a child of the Middle Ages even to resent the alien Renaissance quality in his model. That it is alien to him is proved by his treatment of it, for his omissions and alterations are all in the medieval direction; but he does not reach the point of throwing the Boccaccio over, as he might have done if he had read it with our eyes. In the Teseide Boccaccio takes a personified Prayer—readers of Homer will remember that prayers are among the oldest personifications—to the home of Venus. Chaucer goes thither himself. On arriving in the garden, Chaucer follows the Italian closely for two stanzas, because the Italian is here describing what every medieval poet wished to describe—the joyous life of the place. In the next stanza, after two lines on the music heard among the trees, he deserts his model; and where Boccaccio tells us how the Prayer went to and fro admiring the bell’ ornamento, Chaucer compares the music with the harmonies of heaven, and mentions ‘a wind, unnethe hit might be lesse’. He then proceeds to insert a stanza which has no counterpart in the original at all, and in which he explains how ‘the air of that place so attempre was’, that
No man may ther wexe seek ne old.
Chaucer is, of course, remembering the garden in Guillaume de Lorris, which ‘semed a place espirituel’ and the garden in Jean de Meun where there is no time. But while he thus makes his garden more spiritual, with heavenly music and a dateless present, he makes it more earthly too by the mention of his inaudible breeze; he deepens the poetry every way. There is in Chaucer a far fuller surrender of feeling and imagination to his theme than Boccaccio was prepared to make. Chaucer was working with ‘ful devout corage’: Boccaccio, for all his epic circumstance, feels in his heart of hearts that all this stuff about gardens and gods of love is ‘only poetry’. And so Boccaccio will include a touch of satire and make his Beautee go by sè riguardando, and Chaucer will naturally omit this. Only false criticism will suppose that this superior gravity in Chaucer is incompatible with the fact that he is a great comic poet. Dryden went to the root of the matter when he called him a perpetual fountain of good sense. A profound and cheerful sobriety is the foundation alike of Chaucer’s humour and of his pathos. There is nothing of the renaissance frivolity in him.
A firm grasp of this contrast between Boccaccio and Chaucer is the best preparation for reading the Book of Troilus. For it is possible to misunderstand Troilus. His earlier works require historical explanation, and Troilus speaks at once to the heart of every reader. His earlier works have French models, and it is from the Italian; and they have little humour, while it has much. Above all, they easily pass as allegory with readers who do not inquire closely, while it is not allegorical at all. All these facts make it fatally easy to regard Troilus as Chaucer’s first break away from medieval tradition—to interpret it as a ‘modern’ poem, with much consequent exaggeration of its comic and ironic elements. In reality, the writing of Troilus betokens no apostasy from the religion of Cupid and Venus. Chaucer’s greatest poem is the consummation, not the abandonment, of his labours as a poet of courtly love. It is a wholly medieval poem. Let us take one by one the facts which seem to point to the opposite interpretation. It speaks at once to our hearts, not because it is less medieval than the Compleynt of Mars, but because it deals with those elements in the medieval consciousness which survive in our own. Astrology has died, and so have the court scandals of the fourteenth century; but that new conception of love which the eleventh century inaugurated has been a mainspring of imaginative literature ever since. It is borrowed from an Italian, and not from a French, source; and the Italian source is, in many respects, a Renaissance poem; but then Chaucer is careful to take from his model only what is still medieval, or what can be medievalized. The effect of all his alterations is to turn a Renaissance story into a medieval story. Again, the Book of Troilus is full of humour; but it is medieval humour, and Pandarus, as I have already suggested, is a son of Jean de Meun’s Vekke. Finally, it is literal, not allegorical; but so is the work of Chrétien de Troyes. Chaucer’s Troilus is best understood if we regard it as a new Launcelot—a return to the formula of Chrétien, but a return which utilizes all that had been done between Chrétien’s day and Chaucer’s. The reader will remember how, in Chrétien, the story of external happenings and the story (already partly allegorized) of inner experience, proceeded side by side. We have seen how the two elements fell apart, and how the second element was treated independently in the Romance of the Rose, and raised to a higher power. Guillaume de Lorris deepens, diversifies, and subtilizes the psychology of Chrétien: the heroine of the Rose is truer, more interesting, and far more amiable than Guinevere, and Chaucer has profited by her. He has profited so well, and learned to move so freely and delicately among the intricacies of feeling and motive that he is now in a position to display them without allegory, to present them in the course of a literal story. He can thus go back again, though he goes back with new insight, to the direct method. He can re-combine the elements which had fallen apart after Chrétien, because Chrétien’s combination had been premature. Allegory has taught him how to dispense with allegory, and the time is now ripe for the great love-story which the Middle Ages have so long been in labour to produce. It is not strange that the product should seem to us more ‘modern’ than the travail. In every age the achievements smack less of their own age than the struggles, and speak a more universal language. That is how we know that they are achievements. The best is at home everywhere: but it was first at home, and remains always at home, in its own parish of space and time. Troilus is ‘modern’, if you will—‘permanent’ would be a wiser, and a less arrogant, word—because it is successfully and perfectly medieval.
I have tried to show elsewhere how Chaucer medievalizes Il Filostrato. He is more allusive and digressive than his original; like a true ‘historiall’ poet, contributing to the ‘matter of Rome’, he tells us more of the story of Troy than Boccaccio would have thought relevant. Boccaccio’s standard of relevance is purely artistic: Chaucer’s, so far as he has one, is historical or legendary. In style, Chaucer obeys the precepts of medieval rhetoric, as interpreted and modified by his own genius: he inserts apostrophae, descriptiones, circumlocutiones, exempla, and the like, which are not found in the original, often with beautiful effect. Finally, he brings the whole story into line with those conceptions of love which he had learned, no doubt, from his own experience and imagination, but which he had learned to see clearly and to express from the Romance of the Rose. If anything cannot be so brought into line, he omits it. Passages in which Boccaccio displays contempt for women, are dropped: passages where he shows insufficient ‘devotioun’ to the god of Love, are heightened. Doctrinal passages on the art and law of love are inserted. The cold cynicism of Boccaccio’s Pandaro disappears, to make room for the humour of Chaucer’s Pandarus. And when the whole tale is finished, where Boccaccio simply draws the ugly moral that had been for him implicit throughout.
Giovane donna è mobile, e vogliosa
È negli amanti molti, e sua bellezza
Estima più ch’allo specchio, e pomposa
Ha vanagloria di sua giovinezza,
here Chaucer, never more truly medieval and universal, writes his ‘palinode’ and recalls the ‘yonge, fresshe folkes’ of his audience from human to Divine love: recalls them ‘home’, as he significantly says.
I do not propose, in this place, to compare the two poems in detail. An inspection of them will reveal to any open-minded reader the nature of the change that Chaucer is making, and my present concern is rather with the result—with the historical significance and permanent value of the Book of Troilus as it stands.
To speak of Troilus in the language of the stable as being ‘by Il Filostrato out of Roman de la Rose’ would seem to be an undervaluing of Chaucer’s creative genius only if we forgot that Chaucer’s mind is the place in which the breeding was done. Provided that we remember this, such a description is useful. In the story of Cryseide, and her uncle, and Troilus, Chaucer, by means of episodes borrowed from Boccaccio, brings the personified ‘accidents’ of the Roman out of allegory and sets them moving in a concrete story. The Roman begins with a young man, himself still unattached, wandering in the garden; that is, in the world of youth and courtly leisure. Chaucer departs from Boccaccio, whose Troilo has already tried love, and begins with the unattached Troilus in the Trojan temple. In both stories the God of Love is following the wanderer unseen, and his archery (which has become a mere colour in the language of Boccaccio) is adequately dealt with by Chaucer. Shot through with Love’s arrows, the Dreamer continues to advance towards the Rosebud, but finds his way stopped by a thorny hedge: similarly, though Cryseide is so gentle that no creature ‘was ever lasse mannish’, yet her cheer was somewhat disdainful, and
she leet falle
Hir look a lite aside in suich manere,
Ascaunces ‘What! may I not stonden here?’
At last, when all the arrows stick fast in him, the Dreamer, hearing Love’s voice call to him to surrender, yields and kneels, becomes Love’s man and awaits his commandments; Troilus likewise says
O Lord, now youres is
My spirit which that oughte youres be.
You thanke I, Lord, that han me brought to this.
In a later passage (which owes nothing to Boccaccio) he beats his breast and asks the god’s forgiveness for his former jibes. The commandments which Love gives to the Dreamer are not reproduced by Chaucer, but we see Troilus actually obeying them, and the noble lines which describe the improvement wrought in his character by his service to Love, do not come from the Italian:
his maner tho forth ay
So goodly was and gat him so in grace
That ech him lovede that loked on his face.
As the Dreamer fears to pass the thorny hedge, so Troilus shrinks from telling Cryseide his love—‘she nil to noon suiche wrecche as I be wonne’. The Dreamer and the Trojan prince are both visited (though at different phases of the story) by a friend who tells them that the obstacles they fear are not insurmountable; for as Pandarus plays the part of Vekke in his scenes with Cryseide, so he plays that of Frend in his scenes with Troilus. And Pandarus’ whole aim during the early stages of the wooing is to produce in Cryseide the condition which Guillaume de Lorris calls Bialacoil. Troilus, he tells her, ‘nought desireth but your freendly chere’; and the promise he extorts from her is
only that ye make him bettre chere
Than ye han doon er this and more feste.
It is thanks to the labours of Pandarus that Troilus finds Bialacoil awaiting him outside the roseir and soon ready to lead him in beyond it, into the presence of the Rose; or, to speak in our own way, that Cryseide consents to receive and to answer the letter of Troilus and finally to meet him at the house of Deiphebus. Troilus, like the Dreamer, is grateful for admission, but not content: rather
This Troilus gan to desiren more
Than he dide erst, thurgh hope, and dide his might
To pressen on.
But this is not, or not yet, Bialacoil’s intention. He dare not let the Dreamer pull the rosebud, he will only give him a leaf that grew near it; and the Dreamer’s request for the rose itself rouses Daunger from his lair. Cryseide’s ‘bel aceuil’ or ‘bettre chere’ is to be equally limited in its functions: her fair welcome Troilus shall have, but if he and Pandarus ‘in this proces depper go’, they need look for no grace at her hands—not if they both die for it, she adds: for Daunger is very nearly awake. But Bialacoil, in the one story as in the other, is in a very difficult position. Soon he is more than half on the enemy’s side, and explains that he, for his part, would gladly let the Dreamer kiss the rose.
Thou shuldest not warned be for me,
But I dar not for Chastite;
—Agayn hir dar I not misdo.
Cryseide’s bel aceuil is a similar deserter in intent, restrained by Shame and Daunger. When she is urged to speak to Troilus, as he rides beneath her window, she reflects that
Considered al thing, it may not be;
And why? For Shame; and it were eek to sone
To graunten him so greet a libertee.
‘For pleynly hir entente’, as seyde she,
Was ‘for to love him unwist, if she mighte’.
In both stories Bialacoil has failed to reckon on the activities of Pitè, and, still more, of Venus herself.
We must guard against the danger of identifying Cryseide with Bialacoil—an identification which would be meaningless, since the one is a woman (that is, a ‘rational substance’) and the other is merely ‘an accident occurring in a substance’—a way in which a woman sometimes feels and behaves. Cryseide’s analogue is the nameless heroine of the Roman, not any one of the personifications by whom that heroine is displayed; and those who have followed Chaucer most closely in his devout study of her, will best understand Cryseide. There have always been those who dislike her; and as more and more women take up the study of English literature she is likely to find ever less mercy. Yet none who does not love her and wish ‘to excuse hir yet for routhe’ is seeing her as Chaucer meant her to be seen. That she is not a wanton, still less a calculating wanton, need hardly be argued. The belief that she saw through the wiles of Pandarus, and only appeared to be led by circumstances while in fact she went the way she had intended from the beginning, can be held only in defiance of the text. Chaucer goes out of his way to tell us that ‘she gan enclyne to lyke him first’, and afterwards
his manhod and his pyne
Made love with-inne hir for to myne.
He tells us that she came to the house of Deiphebus ‘al innocent’ of Pandarus’ machinations; and ‘al innocent’ she entered the chamber of Troilus; and when she admitted Troilus to hers it was because the story she had been told was so probable and so pitiful, and she was ‘at dulcarnon, right at her wittes ende’. If we are determined to criticize her behaviour in the first part of the poem from any standpoint save that of Christian chastity, it would be more rational to say that she is not wanton enough, not calculating enough: that we hear too much of her blushes, her tears, and her simplicities, and not enough of her love: that she is ‘cold as ice And yet not chaste; the weeping fool of vice’. This would be an error with some sort of foundation, but it would be an error. In the Cryseide of the first three books Chaucer has painted a touching and beautiful picture of a woman by nature both virtuous and amorous, but above all affectionate; a woman who in a chaste society would certainly have lived a chaste widow. But she lives, nominally, in Troy, really in fourteenth-century England, where love is the greatest of earthly goods and love has nothing to do with marriage. She lives in it alone; her husband is dead, her father a self-banished traitor: her only natural protector, whom she ‘wolde han trusted’ to have rebuked her without ‘mercy ne mesure’ at any suspected frailty, is on her lover’s side, and working upon her by appeals to her curiosity, her pity and her natural passions, as well as by direct lying and trickery. If, in such circumstances, she yields, she commits no sin against the social code of her age and country: she commits no unpardonable sin against any code I know of—unless, perhaps, against that of the Hindus. By Christian standards, forgivable: by the rules of courtly love, needing no forgiveness: this is all that need be said of Cryseide’s act in granting the Rose to Troilus. But her betrayal of him is not so easily dismissed.
Here there is, of course, no question of acquittal. ‘False Cryseide’ she has been ever since the story was first told, and will be till the end. And her offence is rank. By the code of courtly love it is unpardonable; in Christian ethics it is as far below her original unchastity as Brutus and Iscariot, in Dante’s hell, lie lower than Paolo and Francesca. But we must not misunderstand her sin; we must not so interpret it as to cast any doubt upon the sincerity of her first love. At the beginning of that first love there was some vanity in it: she could not help reflecting that she was ‘oon the fayreste, out of drede’, and ‘with sobre chere hir herte lough’. But Coventry Patmore, who knows about such matters, has told us that a woman without this kind of vanity is a monster: and, as Chaucer asks,
Who is that ne wolde hir glorifye
To mowen swich a knight don live or dye?
Such venial self-complacencies are, in Cryseide, but the prelude to a complete abandonment of self. Soon she can ask with perfect sincerity
Hadde I him never leef? By God, I wene
Ye hadde never thing so leef,
and in the happy days of their mutual love ‘eche of hem gan otheres lust obeye’. When the blow falls and she must leave Troy, she is gone so deep in love that she can feel Troilus’ pain more acutely than her own,
But how shul ye don in this sorwful cas,
How shal your tendre herte this sustene?
But herte myn, foryet this sorwe and tene
And me also.
There is dramatic irony in the last sentence, but this must not be confused with the irony sometimes falsely attributed to Chaucer in this poem. It is destiny that laughs and Chaucer is far from laughter as he records it: if any grief that poetry tells of was ever sincere, then so was Cryseide’s grief at leaving Troilus. And lest, with the end of the story in our minds, we should make any mistake, Chaucer tells us in so many words
That al this thing was seyd of good entente,
And that hir herte trewe was and kinde
Towardes him, and spak right as she mente.
If it be asked how this sincerity and unselfishness in the earlier Cryseide is compatible with her subsequent treachery, we can reply only by a further consideration of her character. Fortunately Chaucer has so emphasized the ruling passion of his heroine, that we cannot mistake it. It is Fear—fear of loneliness, of old age, of death, of love, and of hostility; of everything, indeed, that can be feared. And from this Fear springs the only positive passion which can be permanent in such a nature; the pitiable longing, more childlike than womanly, for protection, for some strong and stable thing that will hide her away and take the burden from her shoulders. In the very opening of the poem we find her ‘wel nigh out of her wit for sorwe and fere’, alone in Troy, the widowed daughter of a traitor: a moment later we see her weeping and on her knees before Hector, whom she temporarily identifies with the strong defender of her dreams. Hector, who is the noblest minor character in Chaucer, reassures her; but even in apparent safety, even in her jests, there is a significance,
For Goddes love, is than the assege aweye?
I am of Grekes so ferd that I deye.
Her playful and trusting affection for her uncle Pandarus, on which so much of her story hangs, is, of course, but one more form of the desire for protection; and the relation between the two is well depicted in the scene where she begs her uncle not to leave her until they have had a talk about business. Women of her kind have always some male relative to stand between them and the terrifying world of affairs. And Pandarus thoroughly understands his niece. Having roused her curiosity by the hint of a secret, almost in the same breath he begins to allay her fears,
Beth nought agast, ne quaketh nat. Wher-to?
Ne chaungeth nat for fere so your hewe.
and yet to allay them wholly is not his purpose; a moment later he is threatening her with the death of Troilus and of himself. Few things in the poem are sadder or more illuminating than the burst of tears with which Cryseide receives the news, and the bitter reproach
What! Is this al the joye and al the feste?
—wrung from her by the realization that the protector of the moment (i.e. Pandarus) has deserted her, while she is still unprepared to find the new protector in Troilus, and can only pray
O lady myn, Pallas!
Thou in this dredful cas for me purveye.
For dreadful to Cryseide it is. She knows that ‘unhappes fallen thikke alday for love’; she believes that her uncle’s life ‘lyth in balaunce’; she fears scandal, and she fears love itself, its pains, uncertainties, and anxieties. She fears the anger of Troilus, as well she may, remembering her ambiguous position in a besieged city:
Eek wel wot I my kinges sone is he;—
Now were I wys me hate to purchase
Withouten nede, ther I may stonde in grace?
It may be doubted whether Cryseide herself knows precisely how this form of fear affects her. It may reasonably be asked whether there is not in such a woman (though in no impure sense) a dash of what is now called masochism—whether the prince’s power to hurt, which is but the other side of his power to defend, is not the most potent of all the spells that are cast upon her. However this may be, Chaucer makes us to understand that Cryseide’s first fears of love and of her lover spring from the same root as her later contentment and confidence. The ‘tyme swete’ of love, for such a nature, could not be more accurately described,
Wel she felte he was to hir a wal
Of steel, and sheld from every displeasaunce;
That to ben in his gode governaunce,
So wys he was, she was no more afered.
No longer afraid, and no longer unloving; even no longer selfish. Such as Cryseide, once given the shelter they desire, repay it with complete devotion; it is not to be believed that she would ever have been faithless to Troilus, ever less than a perfect lover to him, as long as he was present. What cruelty it is, to subject such a woman to the test of absence—and of absence with no assured future of reunion, absence compelled by the terrible outerworld of law and politics and force (which she cannot face), absence amid alien scenes and voices
With wommen fewe, among the Grekes stronge.
Everyone can foresee the result. No one, not even Troilus, is deceived by those desperate speeches in which Cryseide, with pitiful ignorance of her self, attempts to assume the role of comforter and to become a woman of practical ability, resource, and hardihood, who will arrange everything; because, forsooth, some one has told the poor child that women are like that—‘wommen ben wyse in short avysement’. Her attempt to be ‘feminine’ in this sense is short-lived. The very depth of her love for Troilus facilitates her fall, in so far as it produces in her, when once Troilus is left behind, a desolation that heightens to imperative craving her normal hunger for comfort and protection. The old ‘wal and sheld’ is gone: the more she misses it, the more she needs a new one, and hardly has she ridden out of Troy gate before the new one is at hand: the first, and the only friendly and protective thing that meets her in the new, homesick life among those ‘Grekes stronge’ who have been a bogey to her for the best part of ten years. The situation, in itself, is half the battle for Diomede; but Diomede, in any situation, would have been a dangerous wooer to Cryseide. Except for fashion’s sake, and for a short time, he is no suppliant like Troilus. With swift, nonchalant cruelty he hammers into pieces all her hopes of any comfort save from himself:
The folk of Troye, as who seyth, alle and some
In preson been, as ye your-selven see;
For thennes shal not oon on lyve come
For al the gold bitwixen sonne and see
—Trusteth wel and understondeth me!
The stinging brutality of that last, trochaic line is a masterpiece: we can almost see the handsome, blackguardly jaw thrust out. But while all men, and all good women, will hate Diomede, Cryseide cannot. I spoke just now of mazochism ‘in no impure sense’; but the descent to hell is easy, and those who begin by worshipping power soon worship evil. Chaucer had better be left to tell in his own words the effect of Diomede’s tactics upon Cryseide,
Retorning in hir soule ay up and down
The wordes of this sodein Diomede
His greet estat, and peril of the toun,
And that she was allone and hadde nede
Of freendes help.
It must be said for Cryseide that she does not reach this point without a struggle: a struggle so intense that she can even propose, or think that she proposes, ‘to stele awey by night’. That Cryseide, for whom even flight with Troilus was too terrible, will ever really go out alone, by night, to cross the no man’s land between the camp and Troy, is a psychological impossibility; but the fact that she can consider such a project bears witness to her desperate efforts to rise above herself. And yet, such is the cruelty of her situation, that this very effort must speed Diomede’s suit. As soon as she has resolved, or striven to resolve, upon it, Diomede becomes, no longer the alternative to Troilus, but the alternative to flight. The picture of herself in Diomede’s arms gains the all but irresistible attraction that it blots out the unbearable picture of herself stealing out past the sentries in the darkness. And so, weeping and half-unwilling, and self-excusing, and repentant by anticipation before her guilt is consummated, the unhappy creature becomes the mistress of her Greek lover, grasping at the last chance of self-respect with the words
To Diomede algate I wol be trewe.
What follows detracts little further from the character whose ruin we have been watching. It is disgusting that she should give Troilus’ brooch to Diomede, and her last letter to Troilus is abominable; but these are involved in her fall. Such a woman has no resistant virtues that should delay her complete degradation when once she is united with a degrading lover. The same pliancy which ennobled her as the mistress of Troilus, debases her as the mistress of Diomede. For when she yields, she yields all: she has given herself to the Greek tamquam cadaver, and his vices are henceforth hers. Her further descent from being Diomede’s mistress to being a common prostitute, and finally a leprous beggar, as in Henryson, cannot be said to be improbable.
Such is Chaucer’s Cryseide; a tragic figure in the strictest Aristotelian sense, for she is neither very good nor execrably wicked. In happier circumstances she would have been a faithful mistress, or a faithful wife, an affectionate mother, and a kindly neighbour—a happy woman and a cause of happiness to all about her—caressed and caressing in her youth, and honoured in her old age. But there is a flaw in her, and Chaucer has told us what it is; ‘she was the ferfulleste wight that mighte be’. If fate had so willed, men would have known this flaw only as a pardonable, perhaps an endearing, weakness; but fate threw her upon difficulties which convert it into a tragic fault, and Cryseide is ruined.
Pandarus is exactly the opposite of his niece. He is, above all, the practical man, the man who ‘gets things done’. It is his delight to manipulate that world of affairs from which Cryseide longs to be protected. Every one has met the modern equivalent of Pandarus. When you are in the hands of such a man you can travel first class through the length and breadth of England on a third-class ticket; policemen and gamekeepers will fade away before you, placated yet unbribed; noble first-floor bedrooms will open for you in hotels that have sworn they are absolutely full; and drinks will be forthcoming at hours when the rest of the world goes thirsty. And all the time, he will be such good company that he can
make you so to laugh at his folye
That you for laughter wenen for to dye.
Yet he is no mere comedian: he can talk with you far into the night, when the joking and the ‘tales of Wade’ are over, of
many an uncouth glad and deep matere
As freendes doon, whan they been met y-fere,
and if it is necessary to speak to others on your behalf he can ‘ring hem out a proces lyk a belle’. He is faithful, too, once you have won him to your side: a discreet, resourceful, indefatigable man; and if it is unwise to entrust your affairs to him, that is largely because his friendship will lead him to go too far on your behalf. So far the character is easily recognizable, for it is happily not uncommon in life, though rare in fiction. What surprises us is to find in conjunction with this practical efficiency, this merriment, and this warm, not over-scrupulous, affection, all the characteristics of a fourteenth-century gentleman; for Pandarus is a lover and a doctor in Love’s law, a friend according to the old, high code of friendship, and a man of sentiment. The ‘ironic’ Pandarus is not to be found in the pages of Chaucer, and those who approach him with this preconception will be disappointed as they read how he ‘neigh malt for wo and routhe’ at the sight of Troilus’ love-sickness; how ‘the teres braste out of his iyen’ while he pleaded with Cryseide; and how, while he heard Troilus pleading for himself in the house of Deiphebus, ‘Pandare weep as he to watre wolde’. I do not say that he did not in some way enjoy his frequent tears; but he enjoyed them not as a vulgar scoffer, but as a convinced servant of the god of Love, in whose considered opinion the bliss and pathos of a gravely conducted amour are the finest flower of human life. A moment after he has thus wept we are told that
Fil Pandarus on knees and up his iyen
To hevene threw, and held his hondes hye,
‘Immortal God!’ quod he, ‘That mayst nought dyen,
Cupide I mene, of this mayst glorifye. . . .
If Pandarus is consciously playing a part at this moment, he is a buffoon of the most odious sort. The whole scene becomes crude and farcical: fitter for a harlequinade than for a romance. Not to such characters does Chaucer entrust the comic element in a great poem; for nothing that I have said must be taken to contradict the view that Pandarus is comic, or even that he represents, in a way, the negative element of common sense amidst the courtly idealisms. But the thing is far more delicate—the comedy more subtle—than the modern reader expects it to be. Pandarus is perfectly serious when he expounds the commandments of Love—or even general philosophy—to Troilus. And Chaucer is serious, too, to the extent that he seriously wishes to include all this erotic, or other, instruction: what would a love-poem be without ‘doctryne’? What is funny—and doubtless intended to be funny—is the contrast between love’s victim and love’s doctrinaire; the contrast which leads poor Troilus to cry
Freend, though that I stille lye
I am not deef.
and again
Lat be thyne olde ensaumples I thee preye.
There is comedy, too, in the prolixity and pedantry of Pandarus—the ease with which he reels off the letter of Oenone, the doctrine of contraries, the rules for a lover’s service, and the lover’s guide to letter writing—as though he had learned them by heart, as very probably he had. Complacent instruction, when the instructor is willing and the pupil not, is always funny, and specially funny to Chaucer. But the intention of Pandarus is not comic—Pandarus would be less comic if it were—and the content of his instruction is not meant to be ridiculous. Certainly, Chaucer would be ill pleased if we laughed at such a stanza as the following:
What! Shulde he therfor fallen in despeyr,
Or be recreaunt for his owene tene,
Or sleen himself, al be his lady fayr?
Nay, nay: but ever in oon be fresh and grene
To serve and love his dere hertes quene
And thenke it is a guerdoun hir to serve
A thousandfold more than he can deserve.
Here, and in many similar passages, Pandarus combines with his comic role another function equally necessary in Chaucer’s eyes. Chaucer intends to teach, as well as to paint, the mystery of courtly love; and the direct doctrine which Love himself, or Frend, or the Vekke, would have spoken in an allegory, is given to Pandarus. It is not what Pandarus says that is comic, on Chaucer’s view: it is the importunity, the prolixity, the laughable union of garrulity and solemnity, with which he says it. And this is only part and parcel of his general officiousness. If by a busybody we mean one who is ineffectively busy, then, to be sure, ‘busybody’ is the last name we can give to Pandarus. But he has the fussiness of the busybody; even where there is nothing to be done, he must needs do something. When Troilus sinks to his knees at Cryseide’s bedside, Pandarus comes bustling forward with a cushion for him to kneel on. This is exquisitely funny if we imagine Pandarus doing it with the anxious and perspiring gravity of an old-fashioned nurse—‘he for a quisshen ran’; but it is hardly funny at all, it is merely silly, if he does it as a joke. Similarly it is not a knowing leer on the part of Pandarus, it is rather the poor man’s despair at finding he can be busy no longer, his sense of anticlimax, which should make us laugh when he says plaintively:
For ought I can espyen
This light nor I ne serven here of nought.
And yet, of course, there is knowing humour, or raillery, in the words that immediately follow; and in the banter with which he greets Cryseide next morning, there is humour of a familiar avuncular or parental type, somewhat now discredited. It is this side of Pandarus—a real and important element in his character, no doubt—which has led, by exaggeration, to misunderstandings of his character as a whole. The old gentlemen who joked about christenings at marriages in the nineteenth century were no doubt being gross and common-sensible at the expense of the devout emotions felt by the bridal pair. To that extent they were playing the part of the Goose, or the Vekke, or Godfrey Gobelive. But you must not suppose that these same old gentlemen repudiated the monogamic idealism and romanticism of their period, or would have been anything but outraged at a serious attack upon it: to that extent they play the part of the eagle, or Troilus, or Grand Amour. They eat their cake and have it too, like rational creatures. If romantic love were not venerable, who but a simpleton would poke fun at it? And so it is with Pandarus. He is inside the magic circle of courtly love—a devout, even a pedantic and lachrymose, exponent of it. But he, like every one else, except the lovers themselves for short moments in ‘the fury of their kindness’, sees also the hard or banal lineaments of the work-day world showing through the enchanted haze; and that on two levels. On the first, he sees eye to eye with the merry old Victorians, and can tease the lovers’ pudency or laugh away their fears; ‘she will not bite you’, as he says to Troilus. On the second level, like all Love’s medieval servants, he sees the fatal discrepancy between the commandments of Love and the commandments of God, and becomes uneasy about the part he is playing. He begins to protest too much. He has never done it before—he will never do it again—he had been half in fun at the beginning—at least he is not being paid for it—it was sheer pity for Troilus that made him do it. But when all is said, he cannot resist the obvious conclusion:
Wo is me that I, that cause al this
May thenken that she is my nece dere,
And I hir eem and traytor eke y-fere.
The character of Pandarus cannot be put in a nutshell: the subtlety of a poet’s creation is ‘far greater than the subtlety of discourse’. There is fold within fold to be disentangled in him, and analysis, with its multiple distinctions, will never exhaust what imagination has brought forth with the unity of nature herself. But we must not substitute a neat satiric abstraction for the richly concrete human being whom Chaucer has given us.
Troilus, throughout the poem, suffers more than he acts. He is the shore upon which all these waves break, and Chaucer has accurately described his theme as being how Troilus’ ‘aventures fellen Fro wo to wele and after out of joye’. This is not to say that the character of Troilus is ill drawn, but rather that the drawing of Troilus’ character is no principal part of Chaucer’s purpose; that about Troilus there still hangs something of the anonymity of the Dreamer, the mere ‘I’, of the allegories. He can be, to some extent, assumed: he is in one sense unimportant, because he is, in another, all important. As an embodiment of the medieval ideal of lover and warrior, he stands second only to Malory’s Launcelot: far, I think, above the Launcelot of Chrétien. We never doubt his valour, his constancy, or the ‘daily beauty’ of his life. His humility, his easy tears, and his unabashed self-pity in adversity will not be admired in our own age. They must, however, be confessed to be true (intolerably true in places) to nature; and, for their admirableness or the reverse, Chaucer forewarns us,
and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so
And spedde as wel in Love as men now do.
Of such a character, so easily made happy and so easily broken, there can be no tragedy in the Greek or in the modern sense. The end of Troilus is the great example in our literature of pathos pure and unrelieved. All is to be endured and nothing is to be done. The species of suffering is one familiar to us all, as the sufferings of Lear and Oedipus are not. All men have waited with ever-decreasing hope, day after day, for some one or for something that does not come, and all would willingly forget the experience. Chaucer spares us no detail of the prolonged and sickening process to despair: every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy. The thing is so painful that perhaps no one without reluctance reads it twice. In our cowardice we are tempted to call it sentimental. We turn, for relief, to the titanic passions and heroic deaths of tragedy, because they are sublime and remote, and hence endurable. But this, we feel, goes almost beyond the bounds of art; this is treason. Chaucer is letting the cat out of the bag.
The odd thing is that Troilus and Cryseide, despite this terrible conclusion, is not a depressing poem. A curious phenomenon is to be noted here, similar to that which was noted in the Book of the Duchesse, where Chaucer’s picture of the lost happiness proved so potent as almost to override the consideration of its loss. It is the same with Troilus. Chaucer has lavished more than half his work, if we regard mere number of lines, upon the happy phase of his story, the first wooing and winning of Cryseide: he has spent almost the whole of the third book upon fruition. But the question is not one of arithmetic. It is the quality of the first three books, and above all of the third, that counts; that book which is in effect a long epithalamium, and which contains, between its soaring invocation to the ‘blisful light’ of the third heaven and its concluding picture of Troilus at the hunt (sparing the ‘smale bestes’), some of the greatest erotic poetry of the world. It is a lesson worth learning, how Chaucer can so triumphantly celebrate the flesh without becoming either delirious like Rossetti or pornographic like Ovid. The secret lies, I think, in his concreteness. Lust is more abstract than logic: it seeks (hope triumphing over experience) for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary, conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness. So Lawrence writhes. But with Chaucer we are rooted in the purifying complexities of the real world. Behind the lovers—who are people, ‘rational substances’, as well as lovers—lies the whole history of their love, and all its ardours and dejections are kept well before us up to the very moment of consummation: before them lies the morning and the beautiful antiphonal alba, remade from old Provençal models, which they will then utter. Outside is the torrential ‘smoky’ rain which Chaucer does not allow us to forget; and who does not see what an innocent snugness, as of a children’s hiding-place, it draws over the whole scene? Finally, beside them, is Pandarus, so close to them in outlook, and yet so far removed: Pandarus, the go-between, the bridge not only between Troilus and Cryseide but also between the world of romance and the world of comedy.
Thus Troilus is what Chaucer meant it to be—a great poem in praise of love. Here also, despite the tragic and comic elements, Chaucer shows himself, as in the Book of the Duchesse, the Parlement, and the Canterbury Tales, our supreme poet of happiness. The poetry which represents peace and joy, desires fulfilled and winter overgone, the poetry born under festal Jove, is of a high and difficult order: if rarity be the test of difficulty, it is the most difficult of all. In it Chaucer has few rivals, and no masters. In the history of love poetry Troilus represents the crowning achievement of the old Provençal sentiment in its purity. The loves of Troilus and Cryseide are so nobly conceived that they are divided only by the thinnest partition from the lawful loves of Dorigen and her husband. It seems almost an accident that the third book celebrates adultery instead of marriage. Chaucer has brought the old romance of adultery to the very frontiers of the modern (or should I say the late?) romance of marriage. He does not himself cross the frontier; but we see that his successors will soon inevitably do so. In the centuries that follow, poems of secondary importance in the history of poetry acquire primary importance in the history of humanity, because they pour the sentiment which the Middle Ages had created into moulds that the law of Reason can approve. The conflict between Carbonek and Camelot begins to be reconciled. In this momentous change Chaucer and the graver of his predecessors have borne an important part, for it is they who have refined and deepened the conception of love till it is qualified for such sanction. The wild Provençal vine has begun to bear such good fruit that it is now worth taming.