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twg_000012921400 | virelayes," imitations of the "Roman de la Rose," poems inspired by antiquity, as it appeared through the prism of the Middle Ages. His writings are superior to those of his English or French contemporaries, but they are of like kind; he has fine passages, charming ideas, but no well-ordered work; his colours are fresh but crude, like the colours of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921401 | illuminations, blazons, or oriflammes; his nights are of sable, and his meadows seem of sinople, his flowers are "whyte, blewe, yelowe, and rede."[] In "Troilus and Criseyde" we find another Chaucer, far more complete and powerful; he surpasses now even the Italians whom he had taken for his models, and writes the first great poem of renewed English literature. The | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921402 | fortunes of Troilus had grown little by little in the course of centuries. Homer merely mentions his name; Virgil devotes three lines to him; Dares, who has seen everything, draws his portrait; Benoit de Sainte-More is the earliest to ascribe to him a love first happy, then tragic; Gui de Colonna intermingles sententious remarks with the narrative; Boccaccio develops the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921403 | story, adds characters, and makes of it a romance, an elegant tale in which young Italian noblemen, equally handsome, youthful, amorous, and unscrupulous, win ladies' hearts, lose them, and discourse subtly about their desires and their mishaps.[] Chaucer appropriates the plot,[] transforms the personages, alters the tone of the narrative, breaks the monotony of it, introduces differences of age and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921404 | disposition, and moulds in his own way the material that he borrows, like a man now sure of himself, who dares to judge and to criticise; who thinks it possible to improve upon a romance even of Boccaccio's. The literary progress marked by this work is astonishing, not more so, however, than the progress accomplished in the same time by | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921405 | the nation. With the Parliament of Westminster as with Chaucer's poetry, the real definitive England is beginning. In Chaucer, indeed, as in the new race, the mingling of the origins has become intimate and indissoluble. In "Troilus and Criseyde" the Celt's ready wit, gift of repartee, and sense of the dramatic; the care for the form and ordering of a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921406 | narrative, dear to the Latin races; the Norman's faculty of observation, are allied to the emotion and tenderness of the Saxon. This fusion had been brought about slowly, when however the time came, its realisation was complete all at once, almost sudden. Yesterday authors of English tongue could only lisp; to-day, no longer content to talk, they sing. In its | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921407 | semi-epic form, the poem of "Troilus and Criseyde" is connected with the art of the novel and the art of the drama, to the development of which England was to contribute so highly. It is already the English novel and drama where the tragic and the comic are blended; where the heroic and the trivial go side by side, as | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921408 | in real life; where Juliet's nurse interrupts the lovers leaning over the balcony of the Capulets, where princesses have no confidants, diminished reproductions of their own selves, invented to give them their cue; where sentiments are examined closely, with an attentive mind, friendly to experimental psychology; and where, nevertheless, far from holding always to subtile dissertations, all that is material | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921409 | fact is clearly exposed to view, in a good light, and not merely talked about. The vital parts of the drama are all exhibited before our eyes and not concealed behind the scenes; heroes are not all spirit, neither are they mere images; we are as far from the crude illuminations of degenerate minstrels as from La Calprende's heroic romances; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921410 | the characters have muscles, bones and sinews, and at the same time, hearts and souls; they are real men. The date of "Troilus and Criseyde" is a great date in English literature. The book, like Froissart's collection of poems, treats "of love." It relates how Criseyde, or Cressida, the daughter of Calchas, left in Troy while her father returned to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921411 | the Greek camp, loves the handsome knight Troilus, son of Priam. Given back to the Greeks, she forgets Troilus, who is slain. How came this young woman, as virtuous as she was beautiful, to love this youth, whom at the opening of the story she did not even know? What external circumstances brought them together, and what workings of the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921412 | heart made them pass from indifference to doubts and anxieties, and then to love? These two orders of thought are untwined simultaneously, on parallel lines by Chaucer, that dreamer who had lived so much in real life, that man of action who had dreamed so many dreams. Troilus despised love, and mocked at lovers: If knight or squyer of his | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921413 | companye Gan for to syke, or lete his eyen bayten On any woman that he coude aspye; He wolde smyle, and holden it folye, And seye him thus, "God wot she slepeth softe For love of thee, whan thou tornest ful ofte."[] One day, in the temple, he sees Cressida, and his fate is sealed; he cannot remove his gaze | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921414 | from her; the wind of love has swept by; all his strength has vanished; his pride has fallen as the petals fall from a rose; he drinks deep draughts of an invincible poison. Far from her, his imagination completes what reality had begun: seated on the foot of his bed, absorbed in thought, he once more sees Cressida, and sees | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921415 | her so beautiful, depicted in outlines so vivid, and colours so glowing, that this divine image fashioned in his own brain is henceforth the only one he will behold; forever will he have before his eyes that celestial form of superhuman beauty, never more the real earthly Cressida, the frail daughter of Calchas. Troilus is ill for life of the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921416 | love illness. He has a friend, older than himself, sceptical, trivial, experienced, "that called was Pandare," Cressida's uncle. He confides to him his woes, and asks for help. Pandarus, in Boccaccio, is a young nobleman, sceptical too, but frivolous, disdainful, elegant, like a personage of Musset. Chaucer transforms the whole drama and makes room for the grosser realities of life, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921417 | by altering the character of Pandarus. He makes of him a man of mature years devoid of scruples, talkative, shameless, wily, whose wisdom consists in proverbs chosen among the easiest to follow, much more closely connected with Molire's or Shakespeare's comic heroes than with Musset's lovers. Pandarus is as fond of comparisons as Gros-Ren, as fond of old saws as | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921418 | Polonius; he is coarse and indecent, unintentionally and by nature, like Juliet's nurse.[] He is totally unconscious, and thinks himself the best friend in the world, and the most reserved; he concludes interminable speeches by: I jape nought, as ever have I joye. Every one of his thoughts, of his words, of his attitudes is the very opposite of Cressida's | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921419 | and her lover's, and makes them stand out in relief by a contrast of shade. He is all for tangible and present realities, and does not believe in ever foregoing an immediate and certain pleasure in consideration of merely possible consequences. With this disposition, and in this frame of mind, he approaches his niece to speak to her of love. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921420 | The scene, which is entirely of Chaucer's invention, is a true comedy scene; the gestures and attitudes are minutely noted. Cressida looks down; Pandarus coughs. The dialogue is so rapid and sharp that one might think this part written for a play, not for a tale in verse. The uncle arrives; the niece, seated with a book on her knees, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921421 | was reading a romance. Ah! you were reading! What book was it? "What seith it? Tel it us. Is it of Love?" It was of Thebes; "this romaunce is of Thebes;" she had secured as it seems a very early copy. She excuses herself for indulging in so frivolous a pastime; she would perhaps do better to read "on holy | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921422 | seyntes lyves." Chaucer, mindful above all of the analysis of passions, does not trouble himself about anachronisms; he cares nothing to know if the besieged Trojans could really have drawn examples of virtue from the Lives of the Saints; history matters little to him: let those who take an interest in it look "in Omer or in Dares."[] The motions | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921423 | of the human heart, that is his real subject, not the march of armies; from the moment of its birth, the English novel is psychological. With a thousand precautions, and although still keeping to the vulgarity of his rle, Pandarus manages so as to bring to a sufficiently serious mood the laughter-loving Cressida; he contrives that she shall praise Troilus | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921424 | herself, incidentally, before he has even named him. With his frivolities he mingles serious things, wise and practical advice like a good uncle, the better to inspire confidence; then he rises to depart without having yet said what brought him. Cressida's interest is excited at once, the more so that reticence is not habitual to Pandarus; her curiosity, irritated from | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921425 | line to line, becomes anxiety, almost anguish, for though Cressida be of the fourteenth century, and the first of a long line of heroines of romance, with her appears already the nervous woman. She starts at the least thing, she is the most impressionable of beings, "the ferfullest wight that might be"; even the state of the atmosphere affects her. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921426 | What is then the matter? Oh! only this: ... 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.[] The conversation continues, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921427 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921428 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921429 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921430 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921431 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921432 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921433 | 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," | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921434 | 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 brighte In March | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921435 | that chaungeth ofte tyme his face And that a cloud is put with wind to flighte Which over-sprat the sonne as for a space, A cloudy thought gan thorugh hir soule pace, That over-spradde hir brighte thoughtes alle.[] Now she unfolds contradictory arguments supported by considerations equally decisive; she is suffering from that _diboulia_ (alternate will) familiar to lovers who | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921436 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921437 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921438 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921439 | 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 easy access to her heart, and that, where one enters so easily, it | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921440 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921441 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921442 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921443 | 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. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921444 | 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![] The passion and merits of Troilus, the inventions of Pandarus, the secret good-will of Cressida, a thunderstorm which breaks out | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921445 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921446 | 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 espyen This 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.[] What says Cressida?--What | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921447 | 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 dere Ben yolde, y-wis, I were now not here![] Were they happy? But juggeth, ye that han ben at the feste Of swich gladnesse.[] | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921448 | The gray morn appears in the heavens; the shriek of "the cok, comune astrologer," is heard; the lovers sing their song of dawn.[] All the virtues of Troilus are increased and intensified 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921449 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921450 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921451 | pay interminable visits.[] 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921452 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921453 | 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; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921454 | let Troilus rest easy, he can count upon her friendship, she will surely return; true, it will not be in ten days; it will be when she can.[] 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921455 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921456 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921457 | 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; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921458 | 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.[] This return to seriousness is quite as noteworthy as the mixture of everyday life, added by the poet to the idea borrowed from his | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921459 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921460 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921461 | 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,[] which will 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 Chaucer ceased to journey | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921462 | 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, , as member | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921463 | of Parliament; the county of Kent had chosen for its representatives: "Willielmus Betenham" and "Galfridus Chauceres."[] 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921464 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921465 | 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 (). 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921466 | many others of those castles which he had described, with "pinacles, imageries, and tabernacles," and ful eek of windowes As flakes falle in grete snowes.[] His great literary occupation, during that time, was the composition of his famous "Canterbury Tales."[] Experience had ripened him; he had read all there was to read, and seen all there was to see; he | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921467 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921468 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921469 | 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"[]; 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921470 | returned from the wars go to render thanks to the saints for having let them behold 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. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921471 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921472 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921473 | 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 and _sauce piquante_ and beer all day long, so popular in the county that, Ful ofte tyme he was | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921474 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921475 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921476 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921477 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921478 | 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 rascal of low degree, who bestows heaven at | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921479 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921480 | 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. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921481 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921482 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921483 | 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, the figures in missals, had been heretofore slender or slim, or awkward or stiff; especially those produced by the English. Owing | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921484 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921485 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921486 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921487 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921488 | 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 more than merely prick skin-deep; and in | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921489 | so doing, he laughs silently to himself. There was once a merchant, That riche was, for which men helde him wys.[] 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921490 | that all sufferings touch, those of the poor and those of princes. The rle 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921491 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921492 | expresses himself in .[] 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921493 | much suffering: "And died the common people of hunger, which was great pity."[] 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 raw material of feats of arms, and as such only figure in the narrative. They figure in Chaucer's narrative, because Chaucer | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921494 | _loves_ them; 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; | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921495 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921496 | the Second's former adversary, the Chancellor Thomas Becket, assassinated on the steps of the altar, and canonised.[] 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921497 | 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 | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921498 | 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 sit in the saddle; the way will be long.[] To make it seem short, each one | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012921499 | 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, | 60 | gutenberg |
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