Chapter 14

... the kinges dere sone,The goode, wyse, worthy, fresshe, and free,Which alwey for to do wel is his wone,The noble Troilus, so loveth thee,That, bot ye helpe, it wol his bane be.Lo, here is al, what sholde I more seye?Do what yow list.[513]

The conversation continues, more and more crafty on the part of Pandarus; his friend asks for so little: look less unkindly upon him, and it will be enough.

But here appears Chaucer's art in all its subtilty. The wiles of Pandarus, carried as far as his character will allow, might have sufficed to make a Cressida of romance yield; but it would have been too easy play for the master already sure of his powers. He makes Pandarus say a word too much; Cressida unmasks him on the spot, obliges him to acknowledge that in asking less he desired more for his friend, and now she is blushing and indignant. Chaucer does not want her to yield to disquisitions and descriptions;all the cleverness of Pandarus is there only to make us better appreciate the slow inward working that is going on in Cressida's heart; her uncle will have sufficed to stir her; that is all, and, truth to say, that is something. She feels for Troilus no clearly defined sentiment, but her curiosity is aroused. And just then, while the conversation is still going on, loud shouts are heard, the crowd rushes, balconies are filled, strains of music burst forth; 'tis the return, after a victorious sally, of one of the heroes who defend Troy. This hero is Troilus, and in the midst of this triumphal scene, the pretty, frail, laughing, tender-hearted Cressida beholds for the first time her royal lover.

In her turn she dreams, she meditates, she argues. She is not yet, like Troilus, love's prisoner; Chaucer does not proceed so fast. She keeps her vision lucid; her imagination and her senses have not yet done their work and reared before her that glittering phantom, ever present, which conceals reality from lovers. She is still mistress of herself enough to discern motives and objections; she discusses and reviews elevated reasons, low reasons, and even some of those practical reasons which will be instantly dismissed, but not without having produced their effect. Let us not make an enemy of this king's son. Besides, can I prevent his loving me? His love has nothing unflattering; is he not the first knight of Troy after Hector? What is there astonishing in his passion for me? If he loves me, shall I be the only one to be loved in Troy? Scarcely, for

Men loven wommen al this toun aboute.Be they the wers? Why, nay, withouten doute.

Am I not pretty? "I am oon of the fayrest" in all "the toun of Troye," though I should not like people to know that I know it:

Al wolde I that noon wiste of this thought.

After all I am free; "I am myn owene woman"; no husband to say to me "chekmat!" And "par dieux!I am nought religious!" I am not a nun.

But right as whan the sonne shyneth brighteIn March that chaungeth ofte tyme his faceAnd that a cloud is put with wind to flighteWhich over-sprat the sonne as for a space,A cloudy thought gan thorugh hir soule pace,That over-spradde hir brighte thoughtes alle.[514]

Now she unfolds contradictory arguments supported by considerations equally decisive; she is suffering from thatdiboulia(alternate will) familiar to lovers who are not yet thoroughly in love. There are two Cressidas in her; the dialogue begun with Pandarus is continued in her heart; the scene of comedy is renewed there in a graver key.

Her decision is not taken; when will it be? At what precise moment does love begin? One scarcely knows; when it has come one fixes the date in the past by hypothesis. We say: it was that day, but when that day was the present day, we said nothing, and knew nothing; a sort of "perhaps" filled the soul, delightful, but still only a perhaps. Cressida is in that obscure period, and the workings within her are shown by the impression which the incidents of daily life produce upon her mind. It seems to her that everything speaks of love, and that fate is in league against her with Pandarus and Troilus: it is but an appearance, the effect of her own imagination, and produced by her state of mind; in reality it happens simply that now the little incidents of life impress her more when they relate to love; the others pass so unperceived that love alone has a place. She might have felt anxious about herself if she had discerned this difference between then and now; but the blindness has commenced, she does not observe that the things appertaining to love find easyaccess to her heart, and that, where one enters so easily, it is usually that the door is open. She paces in her melancholy mood the gardens of the palace; while she wanders through the shady walks, a young girl sings a song of passion, the words of which stir Cressida to her very soul. Night falls,

And whyte thinges wexen dimme and donne;

the stars begin to light the heavens; Cressida returns pensive; the murmurs of the city die out. Leaning at her window, facing the blue horizon of Troas, with the trees of the garden at her feet, and bathed in the pale glimmers of the night, Cressida dreams, and as she dreams a melody disturbs the silence: hidden in the foliage of a cedar, a nightingale is heard; they too, the birds, celebrate love. And when sleep comes, of what will she think in her dreams if not of love?

She is moved, but not vanquished; it will take yet many incidents; they will all be small, trivial, insignificant, and will appear to her solemn, superhuman, ordered by the gods. She may recover, at times, before Pandarus, her presence of mind, her childlike laugh, and baffle his wiles: for the double-story continues. Cressida is still able to unravel the best-laid schemes of Pandarus, but she is less and less able to unravel the tangled web of her own sentiments. The meshes draw closer; now she promises a sisterly friendship: even that had been already invented in the fourteenth century. She can no longer see Troilus without blushing; he passes and bows: how handsome he is!

... She hath now caught a thorn;She shal not pulle it out this next wyke.God sende mo swich thornes on to pyke![515]

The passion and merits of Troilus, the inventions ofPandarus, the secret good-will of Cressida, a thunderstorm which breaks out opportunely (we know how impressionable Cressida is), lead to the result which might be expected: the two lovers are face to face. Troilus, like a sensitive hero, swoons: for he is extremely sensitive; when the town acclaims him, he blushes and looks down; when he thinks his beloved indifferent he takes to his bed from grief, and remains there all day; in the presence of Cressida, he loses consciousness. Pandarus revives him, and is not slow to perceive that he is no longer wanted:

For ought I can espyenThis light nor I ne serven here of nought.

And he goes, adding, however, one more recommendation:

If ye ben wyse,Swowneth not now, lest more folk aryse.[516]

What says Cressida?—What may "the sely larke seye" when "the sparhauk" has caught it? Cressida, however, says something, and, of all the innumerable forms of avowal, chooses not the least sweet:

Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte dereBen yolde, y-wis, I were now not here![517]

Were they happy?

But juggeth, ye that han ben at the festeOf swich gladnesse.[518]

The gray morn appears in the heavens; the shriek of "the cok, comune astrologer," is heard; the lovers sing their song of dawn.[519]All the virtues of Troilus are increased andintensified by happiness; it is the eternal thesis of poets who are in love with love.

The days and weeks go by: each one of our characters pursues his part. Pandarus is very proud of his; what could one reproach him with? He does unto others as he would be done by; he is disinterested; he has moreover certain principles of honour, that limit themselves, it is true, to recommending secrecy, which he does not fail to do. Can a reasonable woman expect more?

Calchas and the Greeks claim Cressida, and the Trojans decide to give her up. The unhappy young woman faints, but must needs submit. In an excellent scene of comedy, Chaucer shows her receiving the congratulations of the good souls of the town: so she is going to see once more her worthy father, how happy she must be! The good souls insist very much, and pay interminable visits.[520]

She goes, swearing to return, come what may, within ten days. The handsome Diomedes escorts her; and the event proves, what experience alone could teach, and what she was herself far from suspecting, that she loved Troilus, no doubt, above all men, but likewise, and apart from him, love. She is used to the poison, and can no longer do without it; she prefers Troilus, but to return to him is not so easy as she had thought, and to love or not to love is now for her a question of being or being not. Troilus, who from the start had most awful presentiments, feeling that, happen what may, his happiness is over, though yet not doubting Cressida, writes the most pressing letters, and signs them in French, "le vostre T." Cressida replies by little short letters (that she signs "la vostre C."), in which she excuses herself for her brevity. The length of a letter means nothing; besides she never liked to write, and where she is now it is not convenient to do it; let Troilus rest easy, he can count upon her friendship, she will surelyreturn; true, it will not be in ten days; it will be when she can.[521]

Troilus is told of his misfortune, but he will never believe it:

"Thou seyst nat sooth," quod he, "thou sorceresse!"

A brooch torn from Diomedes which he had given her on the day of parting,

In remembraunce of him and of his sorwe,

allows him to doubt no more, and he gets killed by Achilles after a furious struggle.

As we have drawn nearer to the catastrophe, the tone of the poem has become more melancholy and more tender. The narrator cannot help loving his two heroes, even the faithless Cressida; he remains at least merciful for her, and out of mercy, instead of letting us behold her near as formerly, in the alleys or on her balcony, dreaming in the starlight, he shows her only from afar, lost among the crowd in which she has chosen to mix, the crowd in every sense, the crowd of mankind and the crowd of sentiments, all commonplace. Let us, he thinks, remember only the former Cressida.

He ends with reflections which are resigned, almost sad, and he contemplates with a tranquil look the juvenile passions he has just depicted. Troilus, resigned too, beholds, from heaven, the field under the walls of Troy,where he was slain, and smiles at the remembrance of his miseries; and Chaucer, transforming Boccaccio's conclusion like all the rest, addresses a touching appeal, and wise, even religious advice, to you,

O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,In which that love up groweth with your age.[522]

This return to seriousness is quite as noteworthy as the mixture of everyday life, added by the poet to the idea borrowed from his model. By these two traits, which will be seen again from century to century, in English literature, Chaucer manifests his true English character; and if we wish to see precisely in what consists the difference between this temperament and that of the men of the South, whom Chaucer was nevertheless so akin to, let us compare this conclusion with that of the "Filostrato" as translated at the same time into French by Pierre de Beauveau: "You will not believe lightly those who give you ear; young women are wilful and lovely, and admire their own beauty, and hold themselves haughty and proud amidst their lovers, for vain-glory of their youth; who, although they be gentle and pretty more than tongue can say, have neither sense nor firmness, but are variable as a leaf in the wind." Unlike Chaucer, Pierre de Beauveau contents himself with such graceful moralisation,[523]whichwill leave no very deep impression on the mind, and which indeed could not, for it is itself as light as "a leaf in the wind."

IV.

After 1379 Chaucer ceased to journey on the Continent, and until his death he lived in England an English life. He saw then several aspects of that life which he had not yet known from personal experience. After having been page, soldier, prisoner of the French, squire to the king, negotiator in Flanders, France, and Italy, he entered Westminster the 1st of October, 1386, as member of Parliament; the county of Kent had chosen for its representatives: "Willielmus Betenham" and "Galfridus Chauceres."[524]It was one of the great sessions of the reign, and one of the most stormy; the ministers of Richard II. were impeached, and among others the son of the Hull wool merchant, Michel de la Pole, Chancellor of the kingdom. For having remained faithful to his protectors, the king and John of Gaunt, Chaucer, looked upon with ill favour by the men then in power, of whom Gloucester was the head, lost his places and fell into want. Then the wheel of Fortune revolved, and new employments offered a new field to his activity. At the end of three years, Richard, having dismissed the Council which Parliament had imposed upon him, took the authority into his own hands, and the poet, soldier, member of Parliament, and diplomate, was appointed clerk of the royal works (1389). For two years he had to attend to the constructions and repairs at Westminster, at the Tower, at Berkhamsted, Eltham, Sheen, at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and in many others of those castles which hehad described, with "pinacles, imageries, and tabernacles," and

ful eek of windowesAs flakes falle in grete snowes.[525]

His great literary occupation, during that time, was the composition of his famous "Canterbury Tales."[526]Experience had ripened him; he had read all there was to read, and seen all there was to see; he had visited the principal countries where civilisation had developed: he had observed his compatriots at work on their estates and in their parliaments, in their palaces and in their shops. Merchants, sailors, knights, pages, learned men of Oxford and suburban quacks, men of the people and men of the Court, labourers, citizens, monks, priests, sages and fools, heroes and knaves, had passed in crowds beneath his scrutinising gaze; he had associated with them, divined them, and understood them; he was prepared to describe them all.

On an April day, in the reign of Richard II., in the noisy suburb of Southwark, the place for departures and arrivals, with streets bordered with inns, encumbered with horses and carts, resounding with cries, calls, and barks, one of those mixed troops, such as the hostelries of that time often gathered together, seats itself at the common board, in the hall of the "Tabard, faste by the Belle"[527]; the inns were all close to each other. It was springtime, the season of fresh flowers, the season of love, the season, too, of pilgrimages. Knights returned from the wars go to render thanks to the saints for having let thembehold again their native land; invalids render thanks for their restoration to health; others go to ask Heaven's grace. Does not every one need it? Every one is there; all England.

There is a knight who has warred, all Europe over, against heathens and Saracens. It was easy to meet them; they might be found in Prussia and in Spain, and our "verray parfit gentil knight" had massacred enormous numbers of them "at mortal batailles fiftene" for "our faith." Next to him, a squire who had, like Chaucer, fought in France, with May in his heart, a song upon his lips, amorous, elegant, charming, embroidered as a meadow—"as it were a mede"—with white and red flowers; a stout merchant, who looked so rich, was so well furred, and "fetisly" dressed that

Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette;

a modest clerk, who had come from the young University of Oxford, poor, patched, threadbare, with hollow cheeks, mounted on a lean horse, and whose little all consisted in

Twenty bokes, clad in blak and reed;

an honest country franklin, with "sangwyn" visage and beard white "as is the dayesye," a sort of fourteenth-century Squire Western, kindly, hospitable, good-humoured, holding open table, with fish and roasts andsauce piquanteand beer all day long, so popular in the county that,

Ful ofte tyme he was knight of the shire;

a shipman who knew every creek, from Scotland to Spain, and had encountered many a storm, with his good ship "the Maudelayne,"

With many a tempest hadde his berd been shake;

a physician who had driven a thriving trade during the plague, learned, and acquainted with the why and the wherefore of every disease,

Were it of hoot or cold, or moiste or drye;

who knew by heart Hippocrates and Galen, but was on bad terms with the Church, for

His studie was but litel on the Bible.

With them, a group of working men from London, a haberdasher, a carpenter, dyer, weaver, and cook; people from the country, a ploughman, a miller,

His mouth as greet was as a great forneys,

a group of men-at-law devoured with cares, close shaven, bitter of speech—

Ful longe were his legges, and ful lene,Y-lyk a staf, ther was no calf y-sene—

bringing out their Latin on every occasion, terrible as adversaries, but easy to win over for money, and after all, as Chaucer himself says, "les meilleurs fils du monde":

A bettre felawe sholde men noght finde.

Then a group of Church-folk, men and women, of every garb and every character, from the poor parish priest, who lives like a saint, obscure and hidden, visiting, in rain and cold, the scattered cottages of his peasants, forgetting to receive his tithes, a model of abnegation, to the hunting monk, dressed like a layman, big, fat, with a head as shiny as a ball, who will make one day the finest abbot in the world, to the degenerate friar, who lives at the expense of others, a physician become poisoner, who destroys instead of healing them, and to the pardoner, a rascalof low degree, who bestows heaven at random by his own "heigh power" on whoever will pay, and who manufactures precious relics out of the pieces of his "old breech." Finally there are nuns, reserved, quiet, neat as ermines, who are going to hear on the way enough to scandalise them all the rest of their lives. Among them, Madame Eglantine, the prioress, with her French of Stratford,

For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe,

who imitated the style of the Court, and, consequently,

Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe.

She was "so pitous" that she wept to see a mouse caught, or if one of her little dogs died. Can one be more "pitous"?

All those personages there were, and many more besides. There was the Wife of Bath, that incomparable gossip, screaming all the louder as she was "som-del deef." There was the jovial host, Harry Bailey, used to govern and command, and to drown with his brazen voice the tumult of the common table. There is also a person who looks thoughtful and kindly, who talks little but observes everything, and who is going to immortalise the most insignificant words pronounced, screamed, grumbled, or murmured by his companions of a day, namely, Chaucer himself. With its adventurers, its rich merchants, its Oxford clerks, its members of Parliament, its workmen, its labourers, its saints, its great poet, it is indeed the new England, joyous, noisy, radiant, all youthful and full of life, that sits down, this April evening, at the board of "the Tabard faste by the Belle." Where are now the Anglo-Saxons? But where are the last year's snows? April has come.

The characters of romance, the statues on cathedrals, thefigures in missals, had been heretofore slender or slim, or awkward or stiff; especially those produced by the English. Owing to one or the other of these defects, those representations were not true to nature. Now we have, in an English poem, a number of human beings, drawn from the original, whose movements are supple, whose types are as varied as in real life, depicted exactly as they were in their sentiments and in their dress, so that it seems we see them, and when we part the connection is not broken. The acquaintances made at "the Tabard faste by the Belle" are not of those that can be forgotten; they are life-long remembrances.

Nothing is omitted which can serve to fix, to anchor in our memory, the vision of these personages. A half-line, that unveils the salient trait of their characters, becomes impossible to forget; their attitudes, their gestures, their clothes, their warts, the tones of their voices, their defects of pronunciation—

Somwhat he lipsed for his wantonnesse—

their peculiarities, the host's red face and the reeve's yellow one, their elegances, their arrows with peacock feathers, their bagpipes, nothing is left out; their horses and the way they ride them are described; Chaucer even peeps inside their bags and tells us what he finds there.

So the new England has its Froissart, who is going to tell feats of arms and love stories glowing with colour, and take us hither and thither, through highways and byways, giving ear to every tale, observing, noting, relating? This young country has Froissart and better than Froissart. The pictures are as vivid and as clear, but two great differences distinguish the ones from the others: humour and sympathy. Already we find humour well developed in Chaucer; his sly jests penetrate deeper than French jests; he does not go so far as to wound, but he does morethan merely prick skin-deep; and in so doing, he laughs silently to himself. There was once a merchant,

That riche was, for which men helde him wys.[528]

The "Sergeant of Lawe" was a busy man indeed:

No wher so bisy a man as he ther nas,And yet he semed bisier than he was.

Moreover, Chaucer sympathises; he has a quivering heart that tears move, and that all sufferings touch, those of the poor and those of princes. The rôle of the people, so marked in English literature, affirms itself here, from the first moment. "There are some persons," says, for his justification, a French author, "who think it beneath them to bestow a glance on what opinion has pronounced ignoble; but those who are a little more philosophic, who are a little less the dupes of the distinctions that pride has introduced into the affairs of this world, will not be sorry to see the sort of man there is inside a coachman, and the sort of woman inside a petty shopkeeper." Thus, by a great effort of audacity, as it seems to him, Marivaux expresses himself in 1731.[529]Chaucer, even in the fourteenth century, is curious to see the sort of man a cook of London may be, and the sort of woman a Wife of Bath is. How many wretches perish in Froissart! What blood; what hecatombs; and how few tears! Scarcely here and there, and far apart, words absently spoken about so much suffering: "And died the common people of hunger, which was great pity."[530]Why lament long, or marvel at it? It is the business and proper function of the common people to be cut to pieces; they are the rawmaterial of feats of arms, and as such only figure in the narrative.

They figure in Chaucer's narrative, because Chaucerlovesthem; he loves his plowman, "a true swinker and a good," who has strength enough and to spare in his two arms, and helps his neighbours for nothing; he suffers at the thought of the muddy lanes along which his poor parson must go in winter, through the rain, to visit a distant cottage. The poet's sympathy is broad; he loves, as he hates, with all his heart.

One after another, all these persons of such diverse conditions have gathered together, twenty-nine in all. For one day they have the same object in view, and are going to live a common life. Fifty-six miles from London is the shrine, famous through all Europe, which contains the remains of Henry the Second's former adversary, the Chancellor Thomas Becket, assassinated on the steps of the altar, and canonised.[531]Mounted each on his steed, either good or bad, the knight on a beast sturdy, though of indifferent appearance; the hunting monk on a superb palfrey, "as broun as is a berye"; the Wife of Bath sitting astride her horse, armed with great spurs and showing her red stockings, they set out, taking with them mine host of the "Tabard," and there they go, at an easy pace, along the sunny road lined with hedges, among the gentle undulations of the soil. They will cross the Medway; they will pass beneath the walls of Rochester's gloomy keep, then one of the principal fortresses of the kingdom, but sacked recently by revolted peasantry; they will see the cathedral built a little lower down, and, as it were, in its shade. There are women and bad riders in the group; the miller has drunk too much, and can hardly sitin the saddle; the way will be long.[532]To make it seem short, each one will relate two tales, and the troop, on its return, will honour by a supper the best teller.

Under the shadow of great romances, shorter stories had sprung up. The forest of romance was now losing its leaves, and the stories were expanding in the sunlight. The most celebrated collection was Boccaccio's, written in delightful Italian prose, a many-sided work, edifying and licentious at the same time, a work audacious in every way, even from a literary point of view. Boccaccio knows it, and justifies his doings. To those who reproach him with having busied himself with "trifles," neglecting "the Muses of Parnassus," he replies: Who knows whether I have neglected them so very much? "Perhaps, while I wrote those tales of such humble mien, they may have come sometimes and seated themselves at my side."[533]They bestowed the same favour on Chaucer.

The idea of "Troilus and Criseyde," borrowed from Boccaccio, had been transformed; the general plan and the setting of the "Tales" are modified more profoundly yet. In Boccaccio, it is always young noblemen and ladies who talk: seven young ladies, "all of good family, beautiful, elegant, and virtuous," and three young men, "all three affable and elegant," whom the misfortunes of the time "did not affect so much as to make them forget their amours." The great plague has broken out in Florence; they seek a retreat "wherein to give themselves up to mirth and pleasure"; they fix upon a villa half-way to Fiesole, now villa Palmieri.

"A fine large court, disposed in the centre, was surroundedby galleries, halls and chambers all ornamented with the gayest paintings. The dwelling-house rose in the midst of meadows and magnificent gardens, watered by cool streams; the cellars were full of excellent wines." Every one is forbidden, "whencesoever he may come, or whatever he may hear or see, to bring hither any news from without that be not agreeable." They seat themselves "in a part of the garden which the foliage of the trees rendered impenetrable to the sun's rays," at the time when, "the heat being in all its strength, one heard nothing save the cicadæ singing among the olive-trees." Thanks to the stories they relate to each other, they pleasantly forget the scourge which threatens them, and the public woe; yonder it is death; here they play.

Chaucer has chosen for himself a plan more humane, and truer to nature. It is not enough for him to saunter each day from a palace to a garden; he is not content with an alley, he must have a road. He puts his whole troop of narrators in motion; he stops them at the inns, takes them to drink at the public-houses, obliges them to hurry their pace when evening comes, causes them to make acquaintance with the passers-by. His people move, bestir themselves, listen, talk, scream, sing, exchange compliments, sometimes blows; for if his knights are real knights, his millers are real millers, who swear and strike as in a mill.

The interest of each tale is doubled by the way in which it is told, and even by the way it is listened to. The knight delights his audience, which the monk puts to sleep and the miller causes to laugh; one is heard in silence, the other is interrupted at every word. Each story is followed by a scene of comedy, lively, quick, unexpected, and amusing; they discuss, they approve, they lose their tempers; no strict rules, but all the independence of the high-road, and the unforeseen of real life; we are not sauntering in alleys! Mine host himself, with his deep voice and his peremptorydecisions, does not always succeed in making himself obeyed. After the knight's tale, he would like another in the same style to match it; but he will have to listen to the miller's, which, on the contrary, will serve as a contrast. He insists; the miller shouts, he shouts "in Pilates vois," he threatens to leave them all and "go his wey" if they prevent him from talking. "Wel," says the host,

"Tel on, a devel wey!Thou art a fool, thy wit is overcome,"

What would Donna Pampinea and Donna Filomena have said, hearing such words?

At other times the knight is obliged to interfere, and then the tone is very different. He does not have to scream; a word from him is enough, and the storms are calmed. Moreover, the host himself becomes more gentle at times; this innkeeper knows whom he has to deal with; with all his roughness, he has a rude notion of differences and distances. His language is the language of an innkeeper; Chaucer never commits the fault of making him step out of his rôle; but the poet is too keen an observer not to discernnuanceseven in the temper of a jovial host. One should see with what politeness and what salutations and what embarrassed compliments he informs the abbess that her turn has come to relate a story:

"My lady Prioresse, by your leve,So that I wist I sholde yow nat greve,I wolde demen that ye telle sholdeA tale next, if so were that ye wolde.Now wol ye vouche-sauf, my lady dere?"—"Gladly," quod she, and seyde as ye shal here.

The answer is not less suitable than the request.

Thus, in these little scenes, we see, put into action, the descriptions of the prologue; the portraits step out of their frames and come down into the street; their limbs have become immediately supple and active; the bloodcourses through their veins; life fills them to the end of their fingers. No sooner are they on their feet than they turn somersaults or make courtesies; and by their words they charm, enliven, edify, or scandalise. Their personality is so accentuated that it makes them unmanageable at times; their temper rules them; they are not masters of their speech. The friar wants to tell a story, but he is so blinded by anger that he does not know where he is going; he stammers, he chokes, and his narrative remains shapeless; the pardoner is so closely bound to his profession that he cannot for a moment move out of it; shirt and skin make one, to use a familiar phrase of Montaigne's; his tale resembles a sermon, and he concludes as though he were in church:

Now, goode men, God forgeve yow your trespas ...I have relikes and pardon in my maleAs faire as any man in Engelond ...It is an honour to everich that is heer,That ye mowe have a suffisant pardoneerTassoille yow, in contree as ye ryde,For aventures which that may bityde.Peraventure ther may falle oon or twoDoun of his hors, and breke his nekke atwo.Look what a seuretee is it to yow alleThat I am in your felaweship y-falle,That may assoille yow, bothe more and lasse,Whan that the soule shal fro the body passe.I rede that our hoste heer shal biginne,For he is most envoluped in sinne.Com forth sir hoste, and offre first anon,And thou shalt kisse the reliks everichon,Ye, for a grote! unbokel anon thy purs![534]

A most happy idea! Mine host makes a reply which cannot be repeated.

In other cases the personage is so wordy and impetuous that it is impossible to stop him, or set him right, or interrupt him; he cannot make up his mind to launch into hisnarrative; he must needs remain himself on the stage and talk about his own person and belongings; he alone is a whole comedy. One must perforce keep silence when the Wife of Bath begins to talk, irresistible gossip, chubby-faced, over-fed, ever-buzzing, inexhaustible in speech, never-failing in arguments, full of glee. She talks about what she knows, about her specialty; her specialty is matrimony; she has had five husbands, "three of hem were gode and two were badde;" the last is still living, but she is already thinking of the sixth, because she does not like to wait, and because husbands are perishable things; they do not last long with her; in her eyes the weak sex is the male sex. She is not going to break her heart about a husband who gives up the ghost; her conscience is easy; the spouse departs quite ready for a better world:

By God, in erthe I was his purgatorie,For which I hope his soule be in glorie.

Some praise celibacy, or reason about husbands' rights; the merry gossip will answer them. She discusses the matter thoroughly; sets forth the pros and cons; allows her husband to speak, then speaks herself; she has the best arguments in the world; her husband, too, has excellent ones, but it is she who has the very best. She is a wholeÉcole des Marisin herself.

The tales are of every sort,[535]and taken from everywhere.Chaucer never troubled himself to invent any; he received them from all hands, but he modelled them after his own fashion, and adapted them to his characters. Theyare borrowed from France, Italy, ancient Rome; the knight's tale is taken from Boccaccio, that of the nun's priest is imitated from the "Roman de Renart"; that of "my lord the monk" from Latin authors and from Dante, "the grete poete of Itaille." The miller, the reeve, the somnour, the shipman, relate coarse stories, and their licentiousness somewhat embarrasses the good Chaucer, who excuses himself for it. It is not he who talks, it is his road-companions; and it is the Southwark beer which inspires them, not he; you must blame the Southwark beer. The manners of the people of the lower classes, their loves, their animosities and their jealousies, are described to the life in these narratives. We see how the jolly Absolon goes to work to charm the carpenter's wife, who prefers Nicholas; he makes music under her windows, and brings her little presents; he is careful of his attire, wears "hoses rede," spreads out hair that shines like gold,

He kempte hise lokkes brode, and made him gay.

If on a feast-day they play a Mystery on the public place before the church, he gets the part of Herod allotted to him: who could resist a person so much in view? Alison resists, however, not out of virtue, but because she prefers Nicholas. She does not require fine phrases to repel Absolon's advances; village-folk are not so ceremonious:

Go forth thy wey, or I wol caste a ston.

Blows abound in stories of that kind, and the personages go off with "their back as limp as their belly," as we read in one of the narratives from which Chaucer drew his inspiration.

Next to these great scenes of noise there are little familiar scenes, marvellously observed, and described toperfection; scenes of home-life that might tempt the pencil of a Dutch painter; views of the mysterious laboratory where the alchemist, at once duped and duping, surrounded with retorts, "cucurbites and alembykes," his clothes burnt to holes, seeks to discover the philosopher's stone. They heat, they pay great attention, they stir the mixture;

The pot to-breketh, and farewel! al is go!

Then they discuss; it is the fault of the pot, of the fire, of the metal; it is just as I thought;

Som seyde, it was long on the fyr-making,Som seyde, nay! it was on the blowing...."Straw," quod the thridde, "ye been lewede and nyce,It was nat tempred as it oghte be."

A fourth discovers a fourth cause: "Our fyr was nat maad of beech." What wonder, with so many causes for a failure, that it failed? We will begin over again.[536]

Or else, we have representations of those interested visits that mendicant friars paid to the dying. The friar, low, trivial, hypocritical, approaches:

"Deus hic," quod he, "O Thomas, freend, good day."

He lays down his staff, wallet, and hat; he takes a seat, the cat was on the bench, he makes it jump down; he settles himself; the wife bustles about, he allows her to, and even encourages her. What could he eat? Oh! next to nothing, a fowl's liver, a pig's head roasted, the lightest repast; his "stomak is destroyed;"

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