tions, habits, antecedents, each maintained in his character by his talk and subsequent actions, so that we can discern here, sooner than in any other nation, the germ of the domestic novel as we write it to-day. Think of the portraits of the franklin, the miller, the mendicant friar, and wife of Bath. There are plenty of others which show the broad brutalities, the coarse tricks, and the pleasantries of vulgar life, as well as the gross and plentiful feastings of sensual life. Here and there honest old swashbucklers, who double their fists, and tuck up their sleeves; or contented beadles, who, when they have drunk, will speak nothing but Latin. But by the side of these there are some choice characters; the knight, who went on a crusade to Granada and Prussia, brave and courteous: "And though that he was worthy he was wise, In alle his lif, unto no manere wight, He was a veray parfit gentil knight."1 "With him, ther was his sone, a yonge Squier, A lover, and a lusty bacheler, With lockes crull as they were laide in presse. Embrouded was he, as it were a mede He coude songes make, and wel endite, Juste and eke dance, and wel pourtraie and write. He slep no more than doth the nightingale. Curteis he was, lowly and servisable, There is also a poor and learned clerk of Oxford; and finer still, and more worthy of a modern hand, the Prioress, "Madame 1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 3, l. 68–72. Eglantine," who as a nun, a maiden, a great lady, is ceremoniious, and shows signs of exquisite taste. Would a better be found now-a-days in a German chapter, amid the most modest and lively bevy of sentimental and literary canonesses? "Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse, That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly For Frenche of Paris, was to hire unknowe. Hire over lippe wiped she so clene, Ful semely after hire mete she raught. Are you offended by these provincial affectations? Not at all; it is delightful to behold these nice and pretty ways, these little affectations, the waggery and prudery, the half-worldly, half-monastic smile. We inhale a delicate feminine perfume, preserved and grown old under the stomacher: "But for to speken of hire conscience, VOL. I. 1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 4, l. 118–141. 13 Many elderly ladies throw themselves into such affections as these, for lack of others. Elderly! what an objectionable word have I employed! She was not elderly: "Ful semely hire wimple ypinched was, Hire mouth ful smale, and therto soft and red; It was almost a spanne brode I trowe; Ful fetise was hire cloke, as I was ware. A pretty ambiguous device, suitable either for gallantry or devotion; the lady was both of the world and the cloister of the world, you may see it in her dress; of the cloister, you gather it from "another Nonne also with hire hadde she, that was hire chapelleine, and Preestes thre;" from the Ave Maria which she sings, the long edifying stories which she relates. She is like a fresh, sweet, and ruddy cherry, made to ripen in the sun, but which, preserved in an ecclesiastical jar, has become candied and insipid in the syrup. Such is the power of reflection which begins to dawn, such the high art. Chaucer studies here, rather than aims at amusement; he ceases to gossip, and thinks; instead of surrendering himself to the facility of flowing improvisation, he plans. Each tale is suited to the teller: the young squire relates a fantastic and Oriental history; the tipsy miller a loose and comical story; the honest clerk the touching legend of Griselda. All these tales are bound together, and that much better than by Boccaccio, by little veritable incidents, which spring from the characters of the personages, and such as we light upon in our travels. The horsemen ride on in good humor in the sunshine, in the open country; they converse. The miller has drunk too much ale, and will speak, "and for no man forbere." The cook goes to sleep on his beast, and they play practical jokes on him. The monk and the summoner get up a dispute about their respective lines of business. The host restores peace, makes them speak or be silent, like a man 1 Prologue to Canterbury Tales, ii. p. 5, l. 151-102. who has long presided in the inn parlor, and who has often had to check brawlers. They pass judgment on the stories they listen to: declaring that there are few Griseldas in the world; laughing at the misadventures of the tricked carpenter; drawing a lesson from the moral tale. The poem is no longer, as in the contemporary literature, a mere procession, but a painting in which the contrasts are arranged, the attitudes chosen, the general effect calculated, so that it becomes life and motion; we forget ourselves at the sight, as in the case of every life-like work; and we long to get on horseback on a fine sunny morning, and canter along green meadows with the pilgrims to the shrine of the good saint of Canterbury. Weigh the value of the words "general effect." According as we plan it or not, we enter on our maturity or infancy! The whole future lies in these two words. Savages or half savages, warriors of the Heptarchy or knights of the middle age; up to this period, no one had reached to this point. They had strong emotions, tender at times, and each expressed them according to the original gift of his race, some by short cries, others by continuous babble. But they did not command or guide their impressions; they sang or conversed by impulse, at random, according to the bent of their disposition, leaving their ideas to present themselves as they might, and when they hit upon order, it was ignorantly and involuntarily. Here for the first time appears a superiority of intellect, which at the instant of conception suddenly halts, rises above itself, passes judgment, and says to itself, "This phrase tells the same thing as the last― remove it; these two ideas are disjointed-connect them; this description is feeble-reconsider it." When a man can speak thus he has an idea, not learned in the schools, but personal and practical, of the human mind, its process and needs, and of things also, their composition and combinations; he has a style, that is, he is capable of making everything understood and seen by the human mind.. He can extract from every object, landscape, situation, character, the special and significant marks, so as to group and arrange them, in order to compose an artificial work which surpasses the natural work in its purity and completeHe is capable, as Chaucer was, of seeking out in the old common forest of the middle ages, stories and legends, to replant them in his own soil, and make them send out new shoots. He ness. has the right and the power, as Chaucer had, of copying and translating, because by dint of retouching he impresses on his translations and copies his original mark; he re-creates what he imitates, because through or by the side of worn-out fancies and monotonous stories, he can display, as Chaucer did, the charming ideas of an amiable and elastic mind, the thirty master-forms of the fourteenth century, the splendid freshness of the verdurous landscape and spring-time of England. He is not far from conceiving an idea of truth and life. He is on the brink of independent thought and fertile discovery. This was Chaucer's position. At the distance of a century and a half, he has affinity with the poets of Elizabeth1 by his gallery of pictures, and with the reformers of the sixteenth century by his portrait of the good parson. Affinity merely. He advanced a few steps beyond the threshold of his art, but he paused at the end of the vestibule. He half opens the great door of the temple, but does not take his seat there; at most, he sat down in it only at intervals. In Arcite and Palamon, in Troilus and Cressida, he sketches sentiments, but does not create characters; he easily and naturally traces the winding course of events and conversations, but does not mark the precise outline of a striking figure. If occasionally, as in the description of the temple of Mars, after the Thebaid of Statius, feeling at his back the glowing breeze of poetry, he draws out his feet, clogged with the mud of the middle age, and at a bound stands upon the poetic plain on which Statius imitated Virgil and equaled Lucan, he, at other times, again falls back into the childish gossip of the trouvères, or the dull gabble of learned clerksto "Dan Phebus or Apollo-Delphicus." Elsewhere, a commonplace remark on art intrudes in the midst of an impassioned description. He uses three thousand verses to conduct Troilus to his first interview. He is like a precocious and poetical child, who mingles in his love-dreams quotations from his grammar and recollections of his alphabet. Even in the Canterbury Tales he 2 1 Tennyson, in his Dream of Fair Women, sings: "Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath 2 Speaking of Cressida, Iv., book i. p. 236, he says: "Right as our first letter is now an a, In beautie first so stood she makeles, |
