CHAPTER III.

CHARACTERISTICS OF CHAUCER AND OF HIS POETRY.

THUS, then, Chaucer had passed away-whether in good or in evil odour with the powerful interest with which John of Gaunt's son had entered into his unwritten concordate, after all, matters but little now. He is no dim shadow to us, even in his outward presence; for we possess sufficient materials from which to picture to ourselves with good assurance what manner of man he was. Occleve painted from memory, on the margin of one of his own works, a portrait of his "worthy master," over against a passage in which, after praying the Blessed Virgin to intercede for the eternal happiness of one who had written so much in her honour, he proceeds as follows :—

"Although his life be quenched, the resemblance
Of him hath in me so fresh liveliness,
That to put other men in rémembrance
Of his person I have here his likeness
Made, to this end in very soothfastness,

That they that have of him lost thought and mind
May by the painting here again him find.”

In this portrait, in which the experienced eye of Sir Harris Nicolas sees incomparably the best portrait of Chaucer yet discovered," he appears as an elderly rather than aged man, clad in dark gown and hood-the latter of the fashion so familiar to us from this very picture, and from the well-known one of Chaucer's last patron, King Henry IV. His attitude in this likeness is that of a quiet talker, with downcast eyes, but sufficiently erect bearing of body. One arm is extended, and seems to be gently pointing some observation which has just issued from the poet's lips. The other holds a rosary, which may be significant of the piety attributed to Chaucer by Occleve, or may be a mere ordinary accompaniment of conversation, as it is in parts of Greece to the present day. The features are mild but expressive, with just a suspicion-certainly no more-of saturnine or sarcastic humour. The lips are full, and the nose is what is called good by the learned in such matters. Several other early portraits of Chaucer exist, all of which are stated to bear much resemblance to one another. Among them is

one in an early if not contemporary copy of Occleve's poems, fulllength, and superscribed by the hand which wrote the manuscript. In another, which is extremely quaint, he appears on horseback, in commemoration of his ride to Canterbury, and is represented as short of stature, in accordance with the description of himself in the Canterbury Tales.

For, as it fortunately happens, he has drawn his likeness for us with his own hand, as he appeared on the occasion to that most free-spoken of observers and most personal of critics, the host of the Tabard, the "cock" and marshal of the company of pilgrims. The fellow-travellers had just been wonderfully sobered (as well they might be) by the piteous tale of the Prioress concerning the little clergy-boy-how, after the wicked Jews had cut his throat because he ever sang O Alma Redemptoris, and had cast him into a pit, he was found there by his mother loudly giving forth the hymn in honour of the Blessed Virgin which he had loved so well. Master Harry Bailly was, as in duty bound, the first to interrupt by a string of jests the silence which had ensued :

"And then at first he looked upon me,

And saidë thus: 'What man art thou?' quoth he;
'Thou lookèst as thou wouldèst find a hare,
For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
Approach more near, and lookë merrily!

Now 'ware you, sirs, and let this man have space.
He in the waist is shaped as well as I;
This were a puppet in an arm to embrace
For any woman, small and fair of face.
He seemeth elfish by his countenance,
For unto no wight doth he dalliance.'"

From this passage we may gather, not only that Chaucer was, as the Host of the Tabard's transparent self-irony implies, small of stature and slender, but that he was accustomed to be twitted on account of the abstracted or absent look which so often tempts children of the world to offer its wearer a penny for his thoughts. For "elfish" means bewitched by the elves, and hence vacant or absent in demeanour.

It is thus, with a few modest but manifestly truthful touches, that Chaucer, after the manner of certain great painters, introduces his own figure into a quiet corner of his crowded canvas. But mere outward likeness is of little moment, and it is a more interesting enquiry whether there are any personal characteristics of another sort, which it is possible with safety to ascribe to him, and which must be, in a greater or less degree, connected with the distinctive qualities of his literary genius; for in truth it is but a sorry makeshift of literary biographers to seek to divide a man who is an author into two separate beings, in order to avoid the conversely fallacious procedure of accounting for everything which an author has written by something which the man has done or been inclined to do.

What true poet has sought to hide, or succeeded in hiding,

his moral nature from his muse? None in the entire band, Petrarch to Villon, and least of all the poet whose song, like much of Chaucer's, seems freshly derived from Nature's own in spiration.

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One very pleasing quality in Chaucer must have been his modesty. In the course of his life this may have helped to recommend him to patrons so many and so various, and to make him the useful and trustworthy agent that he evidently became for confidential missions abroad. Physically, as has been seen, he represents himself as prone to the habit of casting his eyes on the ground; and we may feel tolerably sure that to this external manner corre sponded a quiet, observant disposition, such as that which may be held to have distinguished the greatest of Chaucer's successors among English poets. To us, of course, this quality of modesty in Chaucer makes itself principally manifest in the opinion which he incidentally shows himself to entertain concerning his own rank and claims as an author. Herein, as in many other points, a contrast is noticeable between him and the great Italian masters, who were so sensitive as to the esteem in which they and their poetry were held. Who could fancy Chaucer crowned with laurel, like Petrarch, or even, like Dante, speaking with proud humility of "the beautiful style that has done honour to him," while acknowledging his obligation for it to a great predecessor? Chaucer again and again disclaims all boasts of perfection, or pretensions to preeminence, as a poet. His Canterbury Pilgrims have in his name to disavow, like Persius, having slept on Mount Parnassus, or possessing "rhetoric" enough to describe a heroine's beauty; and he openly allows that his spirit grows dull as he grows older, and that he finds a difficulty as a translator in matching his rhymes to his French original. He acknowledges as incontestable the superiority of the poets of classical antiquity :

66 Little book, no writing thou envy,

...

But subject to be all true poësy,

And kiss the steps, where'er thou seest space
Of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace."*

But more than this. In the House of Fame he expressly declaims having in his light and imperfect verse sought to pretend to "mastery" in the art poetical; and in a charmingly expressed passage of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women he describes himself as merely following in the wake of those who have already reaped the harvest of amorous song and have carried away the

corn:

"And I come after, gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I can find an ear
Of any goodly word that ye have left."

Modesty of this stamp is perfectly compatible with a certain selfconsciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and

* Statius.

97 which at all events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with except by sustained effort on the part of a poet. The two qualities seem naturally to combine into that self-containedness (very different from self-contentedness) which distinguishes Chaucer, and which helps to give to his writings a manliness of tone, the direct opposite of the irretentive querulousness found in so great a number of poets in all times. He cannot, indeed, be said to maintain an absolute reserve concerning himself and his affairs in his writings; but as he grows older, he seems to become less and less inclined to take the public into his confidence, or to speak of himself except in a pleasantly light and incidental fashion. And in the same spirit he seems, without ever folding his hands in his lap, or ceasing to be a busy man and an assiduous author, to have grown indifferent to the lack of brilliant success in life, whether as a man of letters or otherwise. So at least one seems justified in interpreting a remarkable passage in the House of Fame, the poem in which perhaps, Chaucer allows us to see more deeply into his mind than in any other. After surveying the various company of those who had come as suitors for the favours of Fame, he tells us how it seemed to him (in his long December dream) that some one spoke to him in a kindly way,

"And saidë: 'Friend, what is thy name?

Art thou come hither to have fame?'

'Nay, forsoothë, friend!' quoth I;
'I came not hither (grand merci!)
For no such causë, by my head!
Sufficeth me, as I were dead,

That no wight have my name in hand.
I wot myself best how I stand;
For what I suffer, or what I think,

I will myselfë all it drink,

Or at least the greater part

As far forth as I know my art.'"

With this modest and manly self-possession we shall not go far wrong in connecting what seems another very distinctly marked feature of Chaucer's inner nature. He seems to have arrived at a clear recognition of the truth with which Goethe humorously comforted Eckermann in the shape of the proverbial saying, "Care has been taken that the trees shall not grow into the sky." Chaucer's, there is every reason to believe was a contented faith, as far removed from self-torturing unrest as from childish credulity. Hence his refusal to trouble himself, now that he has arrived at a good age, with original research as to the constellations. (The passage is all the more significant since Chaucer, as has been seen, actually possessed a very respectable knowledge of astronomy). That winged encyclopædia, the Eagle, has just been regretting the poet's unwillingness to learn the position of the Great and the Little Bear, Castor and Pollux, and the rest, concerning which at present he does not know where they stand. But he replies, "No matter!

"'... It is no need ;.

I trust as well (so God me speed!)
Them that write of this mattér,

As though I knew their places there.'"

Moreover, he says (probably without implying any special allegorical meaning), they seem so bright that it would destroy my eyes to look upon them. Personal inspection, in his opinion, was not necessary for a faith which at some times may, and at others must, take the place of knowledge; for we find him, at the opening of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, in a passage the tone of which should not be taken to imply less than its words express, writing as follows:

"A thousand times I have heard men tell,

That there is joy in heaven, and pain in hell;
And I accorde well that it is so.

But nathëless, yet wot I well alsó,

That there is none doth in this country dwell
That either hath in heaven been or hell,

Or any other way could of it know,

But that he heard, or found it written so,
For by assay may no man proof receive.

But God forbid that men should not believe
More things than they have ever seen with eye
Men shall not fancy everything a lie

Unless themselves it see, or else it do;

For, God wot, not the less a thing is true,

Though every wight may not it chance to see."

The central thought of these lines, though it afterwards receives a narrower and more commonplace application, is no other than that which has been so splendidly expressed by Spenser in the couplet :

"Why then should witless man so much misween
That nothing is but that which he hath seen?"

The negative result produced in Chaucer's mind by this firm but placid way of regarding matters of faith was a distrust of astrology, alchemy, and all the superstitions which in the Parson's Tale are noticed as condemned by the Church. This distrust on Chaucer's part requires no further illustration after what has been said elsewhere; it would have been well for his age if all its children had been as clear-sighted in these matters as he, to whom the practices connected with these delusive sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, no less impious than futile. His Canon Yeoman's Tale, a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy The Alchemist, concludes with a moral of unmistakeable solemnity against the sinfulness, as well as uselessness, of "multiplying" (making gold by the arts of alchemy):