Chaucer and His England Part 16

And sith he cried after grace, till I gan awake.

So ends this dreamer on the Malvern Hills, and so thought many more good Christians of Chaucer's time. It would be tedious even to enumerate the orthodox authorities which testify to the deep corruption of popular religion in the 14th century. Two books of Gower's "Vox Clamantis" (or one-third of the whole work) are devoted to invectives against the Church of his time; and he goes over the same ground with equal minuteness in his "Mirour de l'Omme." The times are out of joint, he says, the light of faith grows dim; the clergy are mostly ignorant, quarrelsome, idle, and unchaste, and the prelates do not correct them because they themselves are no better. The average priests do the exact opposite of what Chaucer praises in his Poor Parson; they curse for t.i.thes, and leave their sheep in the lurch to go ma.s.s-hunting into the great towns. If, again, they stay unwillingly in the villages, then instead of preaching and visiting they waste their own time and the patrimony of the poor in riot or debauchery; nay, the higher clergy even encourage vice among the people in order to gain money and influence for themselves. Their evil example among the mult.i.tude, and the contempt into which they bring their office among the better laity, are mainly responsible for the decay of society. Of monks and nuns and friars, Gower writes even more bitterly; the monks are frequently unchaste; nuns are sometimes debauched even by their own official visitors, and the friars seriously menace the purity of family life. In short, the reign of Antichrist seems to be at hand; if the world is to be mended we can only pray G.o.d to reform the clergy. Wycliffe himself wrote nothing more bitter than this; yet Gower was a whole horizon removed from anti-clericalism or heresy; he hated Lollardy, and chose to spend his last days among the canons of Southwark. Moreover, in the next generation, we have an equally scathing indictment of the Church from Gascoigne, another bitter anti-Wycliffite and the most distinguished Oxford Chancellor of his generation. St. Catherine of Siena, who knew Rome and Avignon only too well, is proportionately more vehement in her indignation. Moreover, the formal records of the Church itself bear out all the gravest charges in contemporary literature. The parish churches were very frequently reported as neglected, dirty, and ruinous; the very service books and most necessary ornaments as either dilapidated or lacking altogether; priests and people as grossly irreverent.[282]

Wherever we find a visitation including laity and clerics alike, the clergy presented for unchast.i.ty are always numerous out of all proportion to the laity; sometimes more than ten times as numerous. Episcopal registers testify plainly to the difficulty of dealing with monastic decay and to the neglect of proper precautions against the intrusion of unworthy clerics into benefices. Many of the anti-Lollard Articles solemnly presented by the University of Oxford to the King in 1414 might have been drawn up by Wycliffe himself. These pillars of the Church pray Henry V., who was known to have religion so much at heart, to find some remedy for the sale of indulgences, the "undisciplined and unlearned crowd which daily pressed to take sacred orders"; the scandalous ease with which "illiterate, silly, and ignorant" candidates, even if rejected by the English authorities, could get ordained at the Roman court; the system which allowed monasteries to prey upon so many parishes; the pardoners'

notorious frauds, the irreverence of the people at large, the embezzlement of hospital endowments, the debas.e.m.e.nt of moral standards by flattering friar-confessors, and lastly the numbers and practical impunity of fornicating monks, friars, and parish priests. As early as 1371, the Commons had pet.i.tioned Edward III. that, "whereas the Prelates and Ordinaries of Holy Church take money of clergy and laity in redemption of their sin from day to day, and from year to year, in that they keep their concubines openly ... to the open scandal and evil example of the whole commonalty," this system of hush-money should now be put down by Royal authority; that the ordinary courts of justice should have cognizance of such cases; and that such beneficed clergy as still persisted in concubinage should be deprived of their livings.[283]

To comment fully on Chaucer's clerical characters in the light of other contemporary doc.u.ments would be to write a whole volume of Church history; but no picture of that age could be even roughly complete without such a summary as I have just given. We must, of course, discount to some extent the language of indignation; but, to understand what it was that drew such bitter words from writers of such acknowledged gravity, we must try to transport ourselves, with our own common human feelings, into that strange and distant world. So much of the old framework of society was either ill-made or long since outworn; a new world was struggling to grow up freely amid the ma.s.s of dying conventions; the human spirit was surging vehemently against its barriers; and much was swept boisterously away.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CLERGY-HOUSE AT ALFRISTON, SUSs.e.x, BEFORE ITS RECENT RESTORATION

(FOR PLAN AND SECTION SEE P. 97)]

Think for a moment of the English boy as we know him; for in most essentials he was very much the same even five hundred years ago. At fifteen or sixteen (or even at an earlier age, if his family had sufficient influence) he might well receive a fat rectory or canonry.

Before the Black Death, an enormous proportion of the livings in lay advowson were given to persons who were not in priest's orders, and often not in holy orders at all.[284] The Church theoretically forbade with the utmost severity this intrusion of mere boys into the best livings; but all through the Church the forbidden thing was done daily, and most shamelessly of all at the Papal court. A strong bishop in the 13th century might indeed fight against the practice, but with slender success. Giffard of Worcester, a powerful and obstinate prelate, attempted in 1282 to enforce the recent decree of the Ec.u.menical Council of Lyons, and declared the rectory of Campden vacant because the inc.u.mbent had refused for three years past to qualify himself by taking priest's orders. After four years of desperate litigation, during which the Pope twice intervened in a half-hearted and utterly ineffectual fas.h.i.+on, the Bishop was obliged to leave the case to the judgment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose court enjoyed a reputation for venality only second to that of Rome. Other bishops seem to have given up all serious attempts to enforce the decree of the Council of Lyons; Stapeldon of Exeter, for instance, permitted nearly three-quarters of the first presentations by laymen to be made to persons who were not in priest's orders; and he commonly enjoined, after inst.i.tution, that the new rector should go forthwith and study at the University. To appreciate the full significance of this, we must remember that boys habitually went up to Oxford in those days at from thirteen to sixteen, and that the discipline there was of almost incredible laxity.

The majority of students, after inscribing their names on the books of a master whose authority over them was almost nominal, went and lodged where they chose in the town. At the time when Chaucer might have gone to Oxford there were, perhaps, 3000 students; but (apart from the friaries and collegiate provision for a few monks) there were only five colleges, with accommodation in all for something less than eighty students. Only one of these was of stone; not one was yet built in that quadrangular form which, adopted in Chaucer's later days by New College, has since set the pattern for both Universities; and the discipline was as rudimentary as the architecture. A further number of students were accommodated in "Halls" or "Hostels." These had originally been ordinary private houses, rented by two or more students in common; and the Princ.i.p.al was simply an older student who made himself responsible for the rent. Not until thirty years after Chaucer's death was it enacted that the Princ.i.p.al must be a B.A. at least; and since we find that at Paris, where the same regulation was introduced about the same time, it was necessary even fifty years later to proceed against women who kept University halls, it is quite probable that the salutary statute was frequently broken at Oxford also. The government of these halls was entirely democratic, and only at a later period was it possible even to close the gates on the students at night. These boys "were in general perfectly free to roam about the streets up to the hour at which all respectable citizens were in the habit, if not actually compelled by the town statutes, of retiring to bed. They might spend their evenings in the tavern and drink as much as they please. Drunkenness is rarely treated as a University offence at all.... The penalties which are denounced and inflicted even for grave outrages are seldom severe, and never of a specially schoolboy character." "It is necessary to a.s.sert emphatically that the religious education of a bygone Oxford, in so far as it ever had any existence, was an inheritance not from the Middle Ages but from the Reformation. In Catholic countries it was the product of the Counter-reformation. Until that time the Church provided as little professional education for the future priest as it did religious instruction for the ordinary layman."[285] The only religious education was that the student, like other citizens, was supposed to attend Ma.s.s regularly on Sundays and holy days, and might very likely know enough Latin to follow the service. But the want of proper grounding in Latin was always the weak point of these Universities; it is probable that at least half the scholars left Oxford without any degree whatever; and we have not only the general complaints of contemporaries, but actual records of examinations showing that quite a considerable proportion of the clergy could not decently construe the language of their own service-books.

How, indeed, should the ordinary idle man have learned anything to speak of, under so rudimentary a system of teaching and discipline? Gower a.s.serts as strongly as Wycliffe that the beneficed clergy escaped from their parishes to the University as to a place of riot and self-indulgence. If Exeter was a typical diocese (and there seems no reason to the contrary) there must have been at any given time something like six hundred English rectors and vicars living at the Universities with the licence of their bishops; and the Registers show definite traces of others who took French leave. Here, then, was a society in which boys were herded together with men of middle or advanced age, and in which the seniors were often the least decorous.[286] No doubt the average boy escaped the company of those "chamberdekyns," of whom the Oxford authorities complained that "they sleep all day, and prowl by night about taverns and houses of ill fame and occasions of homicide"; no doubt it was only a small minority at Cambridge of whom men complained to Parliament that they scoured the country in gangs for purposes of robbery and blackmail. But the average man cared no more for learning then than now, and had far fewer opportunities of study. The athleticism which is the refuge of modern idleness was severely discouraged by the authorities, while the tavern was always open. The Bishop himself, by inst.i.tuting this boy in his teens, had given his approval to the vicious system which gave the prizes of the Church to the rich and powerful, and left a heavy proportion of the parish work to be done by a lower cla.s.s of hireling "chaplains." These latter (who, like Chaucer's Poor Parson, were mostly drawn from the peasant cla.s.s) were willing to accept the lowest possible wages and the smallest possible chance of preferment for the sake of a position which, at the worst, put them far above their father or their brothers; and meanwhile the more fortunate rectors, little controlled either by their bishops or by public opinion, drifted naturally into the position of squarsons, hunters, and farmers. The large majority were precluded from almost all intellectual enjoyments by their imperfect education and the scarcity of books. The regular and healthy home life, which has kept so many an idle man straight in the world, was denied to these men, who were professionally pledged to live as the angels of G.o.d, while they stood exposed to every worldly temptation. The consequence was inevitable; orthodox writers for centuries before the Reformation complained that the real fount and origin of heresy lay in the evil lives of the clergy. In outlying districts like Wales, probably also in Ireland, and certainly in parts of Germany, clerical concubinage was systematically tolerated, and only taxed for the benefit of the bishop's or archdeacon's purse. The reader has already seen that this same system was often practised in England, though with less cynical effrontery.

CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

"Although the style [of Chaucer] for the antiquity may distaste you, yet as under a bitter and rough rind there lieth a delicate kernel of conceit and sweet invention."--HENRY PEACHAM, "The Compleat Gentleman," 1622

Into this state of things suddenly came the "Black Death" of 1348-9, the most terrible plague that ever raged in Christendom. This was at once hailed by moralists as G.o.d's long-delayed punishment upon a society rotten to the core. At first the world was startled into seriousness. Many of the clergy fought the plague with that self-sacrificing devotion which, in all denominations, a large fraction of the Christian clergy has always shown at similar moments. But there is no evidence to show that the priests died in sensibly larger proportions than their flocks; and many contemporary chroniclers expressly record that the sick were commonly deserted even by their spiritual pastors. After the first shock was over, the mult.i.tude relapsed into a licence proportionate to their first terror--a reaction described most vividly by Boccaccio, but with equal emphasis by other chroniclers. Many good men, in their bitter disappointment, complained that the world was grown more careless and irreligious than before the Plague; but this can hardly be the verdict of most modern students who look carefully into the ma.s.s of surviving evidence.

To begin with, the Black Death dealt a fatal blow to that old vicious system of boy-rectors. Half the population perished in the plague, half the livings went suddenly begging; and in the Church, as on the farm, labour was at a sudden premium. Such curates as survived dropped naturally into the vacant rectories; and, side by side with Acts of Parliament designed to keep the labourer down to his old wages, we find archi-episcopal decrees against the "unbridled cupidity" of the clergy, who by their pernicious example encouraged this demand of the lower cla.s.ses for higher wages. The inc.u.mbent, who ought to be only too thankful that G.o.d has spared his life, takes advantage of the present stress to desert his parish and run after Ma.s.s-money.[287] Chaplains, again, are "not content with their competent and accustomed salaries," which, as a matter of fact, were sometimes no higher than the wages of a common archer or a farm bailiff. But the economic movement was irresistible; and the Registers from this time forward show an extraordinary increase in the number of priests inst.i.tuted to livings. In the same lists where the priests were formerly only thirty-seven per cent. of the whole, their proportion rises during and after the Pestilence to seventy-four per cent.

The Black Death did in one year what the Ec.u.menical Council of Lyons had conspicuously failed to do, though summoned by a great reforming Pope and inspired by such zealous disciplinarians as St. Bonaventura and his fellow-Franciscan, Eudes Rigaud of Rouen.

Again, the shock of the Pestilence, the complete desertion of so many poor country benefices by the clergy, and the scandal generated by this quarrel over wages between chaplains and their employers, naturally threw the people back very much upon their own religious resources. The lay control over parish finances in 15th-century England, which, limited as it was, still excites the wonder of modern Catholicism, probably dated from this period. Men no longer gave much to monks, or even (in comparison with past times) to friars; but they now devoted their main religious energies to beautifying and endowing their own parish churches, which became far larger and more richly furnished in the 15th century than in the 13th.

Moreover, Abbot Gasquet is probably right in attributing to the Black Death the rise of a new tone in orthodox religious feeling, which "was characterized by a [more] devotional and more self-reflective cast than previously." There was every probability of such a religious change; all earnest men had seen in the plague the chastening hand of G.o.d; and in the end it yielded the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which were exercised thereby.

But this bracing process could not possibly, under the circ.u.mstances of the time, work entirely on the lines of orthodox conservatism. When we count up the forces that produced Wycliffism--the notorious corruption of the papal court, its unpopular French leanings, the vast sums drawn from England by foreign ecclesiastics, the unpopularity of the clergy at home, the growth of the English language and national spirit--among all these causes we must not forget to note that Wycliffe and his contemporaries, in their early manhood, had struggled through a year of horrors almost beyond modern conception. They had seen the mult.i.tude run wild, first with religious fanaticism and then with blasphemous despair; had watched all this volcanic matter cool rapidly down into dead lava; and were left to count one more abortive reform, and re-echo the old despairing "How long, O Lord!" "Sad to say, it seemeth to many that we are fallen into those unhappy times wherein the lights of heaven seem to be turned to darkness, and the stars of heaven are fallen upon the earth.... Our priests are now become blind, dark, and beclouded ... they are now darker than the laity.... Lo, in these days there is neither shaven crown on their head, nor religious decency in their garments, nor modesty in their words, nor temperance in their food, nor shamefastness in their gestures, nor even chast.i.ty in their deeds."[288] Such is the cry of an orthodox contemporary of Wycliffe's; and words like these explain why Wycliffe himself became unorthodox against his will. If he had died at the age of fifty or thereabouts, towards the beginning of Chaucer's business career, posterity would have known him only as the most distinguished English philosopher of his time. The part which he played in later life was to a great extent forced upon him by the strong practical sense which underlay his speculative genius. Others saw the faults of religion as clearly, and exposed them as unmercifully, as he. But, while they were content to end with a pious "Well, G.o.d mend all!" Wycliffe was one of those in whom such thoughts lead to action: "Nay, by G.o.d, Donald, we must help Him to mend it!" No doubt there were errors in his teaching, and much more that was premature; otherwise the authorities could never have managed so nearly to exterminate Lollardy. On the other hand, it is equally certain that Wycliffe gave a voice to feelings widespread and deeply rooted in the country. Orthodox chroniclers record their amazement at the rapid spread of his doctrines. "In those days," says Knighton, with picturesque exaggeration, "that sect was held in the greatest honour, and multiplied so that you could scarce meet two men by the way whereof one was not a disciple of Wycliffe." Walsingham speaks of the London citizens in general as "unbelieving towards G.o.d and the traditions of their fathers, supporters of the Lollards."[289] In 1395 the Wycliffite opinions were openly pleaded before Parliament by two privy councillors, a powerful Northamptons.h.i.+re landlord, and the brother of the Earl of Salisbury; the bishops had to recall Richard II. in hot haste from Ireland to deal with this open propaganda of heresy. Ten years after Chaucer's death, again, a Bill was presented by the Commons for the wholesale disendowment of bishoprics and greater monasteries, "because of priests and clerks that now have full nigh destroyed all the houses of alms within the realm." The pet.i.tioners pleaded that, apart from the enormous gain to the finances of the State, and to a proposed new system of almshouses, it would be a positive advantage to disendow idle and luxurious prelates and monks, "the which life and evil example of them hath been so long vicious that all the common people, both lords and simple commons, be now so vicious and infected through bolds.h.i.+p of their sin, that scarce any man dreadeth G.o.d nor the Devil." The King and the Prince of Wales, however, would not listen either to this proposal or to those upon which the pet.i.tioners afterwards fell back, that criminous clerks should be dealt with by the King's courts, and that the recent Act for burning Lollards should be repealed.[290]

The Lollard movement in the Parliament of 1395 was led by Chaucer's old fellow-amba.s.sador, Sir Richard Stury, the "valiant ancient knight" of Froissart's chronicles; and Chaucer himself has often been hailed, however falsely, as a Wycliffite. The mere fact that he speaks disparagingly of the clergy simply places him side by side with St. Bernard, St.

Bonaventura, and St. Catherine of Siena, whose language on this subject is sometimes far stronger than his. As a fellow-protege of John of Gaunt, Chaucer must often have met Wycliffe in that princely household; he sympathized, as so many educated Englishmen did, with many of the reformer's opinions; but all the evidence is against his having belonged in any sense to the Lollard sect. The testimony of the poet's own writings has been excellently summed up in Chap. VI. of Professor Lounsbury's "Studies in Chaucer." In early life our hero seems to have accepted as a matter of course the popular religion of his time. His hymn to the Virgin even outbids the fervour of its French original; and in the tales of miracles which he versified he has taken no pains to soften down touches which would now be received with scepticism alike by Protestants and by the papal commissioners for the revision of the Breviary. (Tales of the "Second Nun," "Man of Law," and "Prioress.") Even then he was probably among the many who disbelieved in tales of Jewish ritual murder, though not sufficiently to deter the artist in him from welcoming the exquisite pathos of the little scholar's death. But his mind was naturally critical; and it was further widened by an acquaintance with many cities and many men. The merchants and scholars of Italy were notorious for their free-thinking; and we may see in the unpriestly priest Froissart the sceptical habit of mind which was engendered in a 14th-century "intellectual" by a life spent in courts and among men of the world. It is quite natural, therefore, to find Chaucer scoffing openly at several small superst.i.tions, which in many less sceptical minds lived on for centuries--the belief in Arthur and Lancelot, in fairies, in magic, in Virgilian miracles, in pagan oracles and G.o.ds, in alchemy, and even in judicial astrology. These last two points, indeed, supply a very close a.n.a.logy to his religious views. It is difficult to avoid concluding, from his very intimate acquaintance with the details of the pursuit, that he had himself once been bitten with the craze for the philosopher's stone.

Again, if we only looked at his frequent poetical allusions to judicial astrology, we should be driven to conclude that he was a firm believer in the superst.i.tion; but in the prose "Astrolabe," one of his latest and most serious writings, he expressly repudiates any such belief.

The a.n.a.logy from this to his expressions on religious subjects is very close. At first sight we might judge him to have accepted to the last, though with growing reserve and waning enthusiasm, the whole contemporary system of doctrines and practices which Wycliffe in later life so unreservedly condemned. But one or two pa.s.sages offer startling proof to the contrary. Take the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women"--

A thousand times have I heard men tell That there is joy in heaven and pain in h.e.l.l, And I accorde well that it is so.

But natheless yet wot I well also That there is none dwelling in this countree That either hath in heaven or h.e.l.l y-be, He may of it none other wayes witen [know But as he hath heard said or found it written, For by a.s.say there may no man it prove.

And, again, the reflections which he adds upon the death of Arcite, without the least authority from the original of Boccaccio--

His spirit changed house, and wente there, As I came never, I can not tell where: Therefore I stint, I am no divinister; [stop Of soules find I not in this register, Nor list me those opinions to tell Of them, though that they writen where they dwell.

It is difficult to believe that the man who gratuitously recorded those two personal impressions, without the least excuse of artistic necessity, was a perfectly orthodox Catholic. It is more than possible that he would not have accepted in cold blood all the consequences of his words; but we may see plainly in him that sceptical, mocking spirit to which the contemporary Sacchetti constantly addresses himself in his sermons. This was indeed one of the most obvious results of the growing unpopularity of the hierarchy, intensified by the shock of the Black Death. That great crisis had specially stimulated the two religious extremes. Churches grew rapidly in size and in splendour of furniture, while great lords built themselves oratories from which they could hear Ma.s.s without getting out of bed. The Pope decreed a new service for a new Saint's Day, "full of mysteries, stuffed with indulgences," at a time when even reasonable men began to complain that the world had too many. Richard II. presented his Holiness with an elaborate "Book of the Miracles of Edward late King of England"--that is, of the weak and vicious Edward II., whose attempted canonization was as much a political job as those of Lancaster and Arundel, Scrope and Henry VI.; and this popular canonization ran so wild that men feared lest the crowd of new saintlings should throw Christ and His Apostles into the shade. On the other side there was the "new theology," which had grown up, with however little justification, from the impulse given by orthodox and enthusiastic friars--pantheistic doctrines, minimizing the reality of sin; denials of eternal punishment; attempts to find a heaven for good pagans and Jews.[291] Even in the 13th century, willingly or unwillingly, the friars had raised similar questions; a Minister-General had been scandalized to hear them debating in their schools "whether G.o.d existed"; and Berthold of Ratisbon had felt bound to warn his hearers against the subtle sophism that souls, when once they have been thoroughly calcined, must reach a point at which anything short of h.e.l.l-fire would feel uncomfortably chilly. This is the state of mind into which Chaucer, like so many of his contemporaries, seems to have drifted. He had no reasoned antagonism to the Church dogmas as a whole; on the contrary, he was keenly sensible to the beauty of much that was taught. But the humourist in him was no less tickled by many popular absurdities; and he had enough philosophy to enjoy the eternal dispute between free-will and predestination. As a boy, he had knelt unthinkingly; as a broken old man, he was equally ready to bow again before Eternal Omnipotence, and to weep bitterly for his sins. But, in his years of ripe experience and prosperity and conscious intellectual power, we must think of him neither among the devout haunters of shrines and sanctuaries nor among those who sat more austerely at the feet of Wycliffe's Poor Priests; rather among the rich and powerful folk who scandalized both Catholics and Lollards by taking G.o.d's name in vain among their cups, and whetting their worldly wit on sacred mysteries. We get glimpses of this in many quarters--in the "Roman de la Rose," for instance, but still more in Sacchetti's sermons and the poem of "Piers Plowman." Here the poet complains, after speaking of the "gluttony and great oaths" that were then fas.h.i.+onable--

"But if they carpen of Christ, these clerks and these layfolk [discuss At the meat in their mirth, when minstrels be still, Then tell they of the Trinity a tale or twain And bringen forth a bald reason, and take Bernard to witness, And put forth a presumption to prove the sooth.

Thus they drivel at their dais the Deity to know, And gnawen G.o.d with the gorge when the gut is full ...

I have heard high men eating at the table Carpen, as they clerkes were, of Christ and His might And laid faults upon the Father that formed us all, And carpen against clerkes crabbed words:-- 'Why would our Saviour suffer such a worm in His bliss That beguiled the Woman and the Man after, Through which wiles and words they wenten to h.e.l.l, And all their seed for their sin the same death suffered?

Here lieth your lore,' these lords 'gin dispute.

'Of that ye clerks us kenneth of Christ by the Gospel ... [teach Why should we, that now be, for the works of Adam Rot and be rent? reason would it never ...'

Such motives they move, these masters in their glory, And maken men to misbelieve that muse much on their words."[292]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY

VIEW FROM NEAR CHAUCER'S TOMB]

More unorthodox still were those whom Walsingham would have made partly responsible for the horrors of the Peasants' Revolt. "Some traced the cause of these evils to the sins of the great folk, whose faith in G.o.d was feigned; for some of them (it is said) believed that there was no G.o.d, no sacrament of the altar, no resurrection from the dead, but that as a beast dies so also there is an end of man."

There is, of course, no such dogmatic infidelity in Chaucer. Even if he had felt it, he was too wise to put it in writing; as Professor Lounsbury justly says of the two pa.s.sages quoted above, "the wonder is not that they are found so infrequently, but that they are found at all." Yet there was also in Chaucer a true vein of religious seriousness. "Troilus and Criseyde" was written not long before the "Legend of Good Women"; and as at the outset of the later poem he goes out of his way to scoff, so at the end of the "Troilus" he is at equal pains to make a profession of faith.

The last stanza of all, with its invocation to the Trinity and to the Virgin Mary, might be merely conventional; medieval literature can show similar sentiments in very strange contexts, and part of this very stanza is translated from Dante. But however Chaucer may have loved to let his wit play about sacred subjects "at meat in his mirth when minstrels were still," we can scarcely fail to recognize another side to his mind when we come to the end of those "Troilus" stanzas which are due merely to Boccaccio, and begin upon the translator's own epilogue--

O younge freshe folkes, he or she In which ay love up-groweth with your age, Repair ye home from worldly vanitee ...

"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for the play is played out." But, though we have nothing of the reformer in our composition; though we are for the most part only too frankly content to take the world as we find it; though, even in their faith, our fellow-Christians make us murmur, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

though we most love to write of Vanity Fair, yet at the bottom of our heart we do desire a better country, and confess sometimes with our mouth that we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.

Indeed, if our poet had not been keenly sensible of the beauty of holiness, then the less Chaucer he! As it is, he stands the most Shakespearian figure in English literature, after Shakespeare himself. Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety. We venerate him for his years, and he daily startles us with the eternal freshness of his youth. All springtide is here, with its green leaves and singing-birds; aptly we read him stretched at length in the summer shade, yet almost more delightfully in winter, with our feet on the fender; for he smacks of all familiar comforts--old friends, old books, old wine, and even, by a proleptic miracle, old cigars. "Here," said Dryden, "is G.o.d's plenty;" and Lowell inscribed the first leaf of his Chaucer with that promise which the poet himself set upon the enchanted gate of his "Parliament of Fowls"--

Through me men go into the blissful place Of the heart's heal and deadly woundes' cure; Through me men go unto the well of Grace, Where green and l.u.s.ty May doth ever endure; This is the way to all good aventure; Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow off-cast, All open am I, pa.s.s in, and speed thee fast!