Chaucer And His Times Part 9

Heer may men seen an humble wys accord; Thus hath she take hir servant and hir lord, Servant in love, and lord in mariage; Then was he bothe in lords.h.i.+p and servage; Servage? nay, but in lords.h.i.+pe above Sith he hath bothe his lady and his love; His lady, certes, and his wyf also, The whiche that lawe of love acordeth to.

(_Frankeleyns Tale_, ll. 63-70.)

The pa.s.sage immediately preceding this, with its beautiful picture of what love understands by freedom, is too long to quote in full, but it shows clearly enough Chaucer's conception of the relation of the s.e.xes. To talk of mastery is absurd:--

Whan maistrie comth, the G.o.d of love anon Beteth his winges, and farewel! he is gon!

True love learns to give and take and does not demand payment for every wrong:--

Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun,[101]

Wyn, wo, or chaunginge of complexioun[102]

Causeth ful ofte to doon amis or speken.

On every wrong a man may nat be wreken ...

and the great lesson of married life is patience and tender forbearance in such moments of weakness. The story ill.u.s.trates the text. Averagus has no word of reproach for his wife when she tells him what she has done, and Dorigen, on her part, shows a simple confidence in her husband's honour which almost makes us forget the impossible absurdity of the situation.

After all, it is in Chaucer's women themselves, rather than in what he says about woman, that we see his att.i.tude most clearly. In the character of Blanche the d.u.c.h.esse he portrays an ideal which differs in many ways from the conventional standard of the day. Instead of the typical heroine of romance, whose sole thought is of love and whose sole desire that her knight may prove the bravest in Christendom, Chaucer draws a lively, quick-witted girl, whose consciousness of her own power and simple delight in her own beauty never degenerate into selfish coquetry. The medieval heroine considered it a point of honour to set her lover impossible tasks to perform for her sake. Blanche "ne used no such knakkes small." She sees no sense in sending a man

... into Walayke,[103]

To Pruyse and in-to Tartarye, To Alisaundre, ne in-to Turkye, And bidde him faste, annoo that he Go hoodles to the drye see[104]

And come hoom by the Carrenare;[105]

and telling him to be

... right ware That I may of yow here seyn[106]

Wors.h.i.+p, or that ye come ageyn.

Nor does she use any arts to enhance her beauty. She looks you straight in the face with those great grey eyes of hers:--

Debonair, goode, gladde, and sadde,

and offers a frank friends.h.i.+p to all "G.o.de folk." She utters no half truths, and takes no pleasure in deceit, nor was there ever

... through hir tonge Man ne woman greatly harmed.

There is no touch of pettiness in her nature. One of the most delightful pa.s.sages in the poem is that in which the Black Knight declares how ready she always was to forgive and forget:--

Whan I had wrong and she the right She wolde alwey so goodely For-geve me so debonairly.

In alle my youthe in alle chaunce She took me in hir governaunce.

At the same time she "loved so wel hir owne name" that she suffered no liberties to be taken with her:--

She wrong do wolde to no wight;

and

No wight might do her no shame.

Through the whole picture there breathes a spirit of vigour and freshness and gaiety. Once again Chaucer seems to foreshadow Shakespeare: Blanche might well take her place beside Rosalind and Portia and Beatrice, as a type of simple unspoiled girlhood. Her frank enjoyment of life, her keen wit, which knows no touch of malice, her combination of tender-heartedness and strength remind us more than once of Shakespeare's heroines, and like them she is no colourless model of propriety, but has all a true woman's charm and unexpectedness.

No other of Chaucer's portraits is so detailed, but he recurs more than once to the same type. Emily is drawn with comparatively few strokes, but she gives us very much the same impression as Blanche. There is the same sense of the open air, the same simplicity and directness. Nothing better brings out the peculiar quality of Chaucer's heroine than a comparison between the Emily of the _Knightes Tale_ and the Emily of _Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_. The one walks alone in the garden, gathering flowers, and singing to herself for sheer lightness of heart. The other converses with her waiting-woman, and her chief interest in nature lies in the hope that the maid may prove able "to work such flowers in silk." There is no reason why the second Emily should not wish to have an embroidered gown, but its introduction here at once destroys the freshness and simplicity of the picture. Canace, too, delights in wandering in the forest in the early morning. She is so closely in sympathy with nature that it seems but natural that she should understand bird-latin, and her quick sympathy with the unhappy falcon is very characteristic of a Chaucerian heroine, for again and again he tells us

That pitee renneth sone in gentil heart.

It is a pretty picture which shows the king's daughter gently bandaging the wounded bird upon her lap, or doing "hir bisiness and al hir might" to gather herbs for salves.

Constance, Griselda, Dorigen are maturer and more developed. They are women, not girls, and women who have lived and suffered, but they are just what we should expect Blanche, or Emily, or Canace to develop into. They have less gaiety and light-heartedness, less pretty wilfulness than these younger sisters of theirs, but they have the same frankness and directness, the same honesty of mind. They meet their fate with grave serenity and simple courage. Griselda abandons herself to what she believes to be her duty. Constance and Dorigen when confronted by danger show perfect readiness to do what in them lies to defend their own honour.

Constance throws the wicked steward into the sea; Dorigen, instead of indulging in hysterics, is quick-witted enough to hit on a way of escape which no natural means could have blocked. Through all three stories runs a vein of tenderness which stirs our sympathy. Griselda, who has borne so much in patience, gives vent to one pa.s.sionate cry of reproach when she is bidden to make way for the new wife, a cry which has in it all a woman's fond clinging to the memory of a past happiness:--

O G.o.de G.o.d! how gentil and how kinde Ye semed by your speche and your visage The day that maked was our mariage;

and surely no direct accusation of cruelty could show with equal clearness how deeply she has suffered. They are great-hearted women, before whose innate n.o.bility the persecutions and unjust accusations to which they are subjected drop into nothingness.

When Chaucer deliberately sets out to draw a saint instead of a woman, he is less successful. Our sympathies are with Blanche, as she sings and dances so gaily, rather than with the preternaturally pious Virginia, who at the age of twelve often feigns sickness in order to

... fleen the companye Wher lykly was to treten of folye,[107]

As is at festes, revels, and at daunces ...

Indeed the whole of the _Phisiciens Tale_ seems curiously cold and lifeless. There is a touch of nature at the end where the child, forgetting her piety, flings her arms round her father's neck, and asks if there is no remedy, and again where she begs him to smite softly, but these are not enough to atone for the perfunctoriness of the rest. The story is too essentially tragic for the barest narration of it not to make some appeal to us, but it is impossible not to feel that Chaucer was either hurried or working against the grain when he wrote his version.

The _Seconde Nonnes Tale_ contains even less of human interest. Cecilia is neither more nor less than the mouthpiece of the Christian religion, and the miracles that she works and the sermons that she preaches leave the reader unmoved. The music of the verse has a charm of its own, and Chaucer's most left-handed work is yet the work of a genius, but a comparison of Cecilia with Constance soon shows the difference between a real woman and an embodied ideal. The miraculous element, which is subordinated to the human interest in the _Man of Lawes Tale_, dominates the whole of the _Seconde Nonnes Tale_, and the inevitable sameness of the various conversions further detracts from its vividness.

In Cressida Chaucer had painted a woman of the b.u.t.terfly type. In the _Canterbury Tales_ he gives us a certain number of actually immoral women, such as Alisoun and May, but he paints no second picture of pretty helpless coquettishness. The heroines of the less savoury tales are coa.r.s.er in fibre and for the most part lower in the social scale than Calkas' daughter, and their stories are of mere sensuous self-indulgence with none of the charm and poetry which marks the tale of Troilus and Cressida. One character alone recalls Chaucer's earlier heroine. The Prioress is very much what a fourteenth-century Cressida would have been if her friends had placed her in a convent instead of finding her a husband. She has the same daintiness and trimness, the same superficial tender-heartedness. It is difficult to imagine that her sympathy, like Canace's, would take the practical form of applying salves or binding up wounds, but:--

She was so charitable and so pitous, She wolde wepe if that she sawe a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.

Her table manners are excellent, and she wears her veil with an air:--

Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was.

Her silver brooch, with its _Amor vincit omnia_, betrays a nave interest in her personal appearance. She is never brought into contact with the more pa.s.sionate side of life as Cressida is, and her seclusion from the world has given her a touch of primness which combines oddly with her little affectations. The contrast between her worldliness and that of the Monk is complete. He is gross, jovial, self-indulgent; she is delicate, mincing, conventional. Like Cressida she would always follow the line of least resistance, though it would cause her genuine--if but momentary--distress to give pain to anyone. She is too well-bred ever to think for herself, and too innocent and simple-minded not to accept life as it is offered her. She tells her story with real tenderness and feeling, and it is evident that the atmosphere of the cloister in no wise irks her. It is impossible to regard her as a pattern nun, but equally impossible to judge her harshly. Both she and Cressida have something childlike about them, and it seems out of place to try them by the ordinary standards.

Of a very different type are Chaucer's practical, bustling housewives, amongst whom the Wife of Bath and Dame Pertelote stand pre-eminent. The Wife of Bath is a capable, active, pus.h.i.+ng woman, with plenty of courage and plenty of self-confidence. She is well-to-do and has a fitting sense of her own dignity and importance, but she has no idea of letting dignity stand in the way of enjoyment, and is quite ready to take her part in the rough jests of the company. Comely of face and plump of person, she dresses well and is quite prepared to make the most of her attractions.

The prologue to her tale shows that she has plenty of shrewd mother-wit.

Her view of matrimony is characteristic. She recognises the "greet perfeccioun" of celibacy, but since all men and women are not suited to such a life, she is impatient of the idea that they should marry but once, and she quotes the Scriptures most aptly for her purpose. Her present husband is her fifth, and when he dies she has every intention of marrying again:--

"I nil envye no virginitee;"

she cries,

"Let hem be breed of pured whete-seed, And lat us wyves hoten barly-breed,"[108]

for barley-bread is by no means to be despised. In fact she is the epitome of common-sense, and her confidence in her own opinion enables her to bear contradiction good-humouredly enough. Her methods with her various husbands were simple: three she bullied and brow-beat, one she paid back in his own coin. The fifth, who had the sense to beat her, was the only one for whom she had any respect, and even he had finally yielded her

... the governance of hous and lond And of his tonge and of his hond also.

It is the picture of a violent, coa.r.s.e--but not wholly ill-natured--woman, who despises bookishness and thoroughly enjoys good ale and good company.

She has no morals and no ideals, though she loves to go

To vigiles and to processiouns, To preching eek, and to thise pilgrimages, To pleyes of miracles and mariages,