III. Public and Private Life

The name of Chaucer seems to have been quite common in medieval times, and is practically unknown in modern times. This alone strikes me as rather curious and unique. Almost all other famous names reappear in some fashion; there storms across the stage of relatively recent history somebody with the remarkable name of Sir Julius Caesar. We have accepted unstartled a worthy dissenting minister as the Rev. Mr. Shakespeare, and admired a brilliant stage-player with the Puritan name of Milton. But we look in vain for Mr. Chaucer, in Bohemia or Belgravia or the suburbs; nor in 'the Street', nor up the Strand is he. The surname has not even appeared as a florid alias, or alternative title, among those who periodically alter their own pedigree and, like the wanton lapwing, get themselves another crest. Curiously enough, the latter course was actually adopted, in the reverse direction, in the original Chaucer family, if certain historians are correct. According to this theory, the son of Chaucer did really abandon his father's crest and coat-armour in favour of that of the De Roets, his maternal ancestors, supposing, heaven help us (such is the simplicity of snobs) that it would aggrandize Chaucer to be turned into Roet. But nowadays, when the Roets are forgotten, it does not even seem likely that Roet would be turned into Chaucer. Not even the most glittering, shifting and opalescent Opalstein, changing his name for the tenth time, ever seems to change it to Chaucer. I suspect that there is in this fact some faint shadow of something already noted here; something that is not exactly neglect, but is in a sense negligence. I mean that vague popular feeling that poor old Chaucer is a joke; that he is a funny, snuffy old man, like an antiquary or a small bookseller selling black-letter and broadsheets. An odd association of ideas about him, who sang in courts and had the confidence of kings: but I believe a very real one, among those who only know his name; and possibly a partial reason for their failure to claim or cling to his name. As I have said, somehow or other, it does not yet sound quite like a serious name: but, whatever be the reason, it is now at least a very rare name. And though it is very likely that a hundred Chaucers will leap out of dark corners or remote colonies, and write me long letters about this rash statement, it is a fact, at this actual moment by the clock, that I have never seen or heard of any living person bearing the once widespread name of the greatest Englishman of the Middle Ages.

Oddly enough, we may say that it was Chaucer who abolished the name of Chaucer. He did a number of rather remarkable things, including, for all practical purposes, tossing off a little trifle called The English Language. The name of Chaucer, or Chausseur, the maker of footwear, was once a common name because it described a common trade. A man was called Shoemaker as another man was called Tailor or Baker or Butler or Gardener; only he was called Shoemaker in French. For that matter, of course, the terms for tailoring and butlering and other things were of Norman and not Saxon origin; but that is another discussion, and a very tiresome one. The really important fact to be seized is this: that it was rather an unexpected, belated and almost reactionary accident, that the glorious English language came into existence at all. It was one of those lucky things that are not likely to happen and do happen; and often nearly happen too late. The whole trend of progress or organic growth was towards France and England growing together, under the common captaincy of a French-speaking nobility and chivalry. If a serious sociologist, mapping out the evolution of mankind, had existed in the earlier Middle Ages (and they had many other plagues and pestilences), that scientific prophet would most certainly have said that England was destined to become as French-speaking as France. The cultured class generally has an unfair advantage over the uncultured; and the whole culture had originally been a Latin culture. The Plantagenet attempts to make France a part of England were really a half-confession that England was a part of France. Then something happened at the last moment, of the sort that confounds scientific politics; something dimly resembling the combined instinctive movements of a populace and a poet. There was a faint trail of Anglo-Saxon traditions and various dialects like Middle English; but left to itself the trail would have led nowhere. Then a great genius saw that he could Frenchify it enough to make it English. That is about as nearly as we can define the process. Chaucer Europeanized English; he brought it into the current of culture, by setting it to foreign tunes and mixing it with foreign terms. But Chaucer destroyed the domination of pure French; he destroyed all sorts of incidental terms, titles and conventions that went along with it; and, while he was about it, he destroyed his own name.

It would seem that the poet's grandfather was a certain Robert le Chaucer, who had some post in the Customs connected with the imports of wine from Aquitaine; so the connexion with the wine trade can be traced at least as far as that. The creator of The Wife of Bath, the great professional widow of literature, seems to have come of a household somewhat haunted by widows; to an extent to alarm Mr. Tony Weller. His grandmother was married at least twice; his mother was apparently married three times; and, touching later developments, it would seem that his sister-in-law was at least once a widow, before she became the third wife of that determined and untiring widower, John of Gaunt. It is a trivial coincidence, and yet not wholly uninforming; for many earnest students have missed the point about medieval life by not noticing that a thing was often derided as comic and yet was very common; was derided as comic because it was very common. Similarly, when we find medieval moralists indignantly denouncing something, we can generally deduce that it was a very medieval thing. Widowhood was really tragic, which is why kings and knights swore specially to defend the widow and orphan; but remarriage was none the less comic because it was obviously convenient. Anyhow, the way in which these rather entangled relations affected Chaucer is roughly this. His grandmother, Mary le Chaucer, who was probably born a Stace and previously married to a Heyroun, had a son named John Chaucer. After the death of her husband, Robert le Chaucer, she married a certain Richard le Chaucer; having apparently a taste in Chaucers. Richard was certainly a vintner and lived in London, in a part called Cordwaners-strete. There is a curious episode about some people called Stace, probably kinsmen, trying to kidnap young John Chaucer and marry him for monetary purposes; the youth being rescued by his stepfather. The stepfather died in 1349; and John himself went on vintnering with increasing success; as he deputized for the King's Butler in Southampton and even seems to have gone abroad in the train of the King. It seems likely that the Chaucers had for some time been, so to speak, among the camp-followers of the Court; but first in lowlier and afterwards in loftier stations or offices. John married Agnes, daughter of John Copton, of a family connected with the Mint, and lived in Thames Street. When he died, the widow was married again to another vintner, bearing the pleasing name of Bartholemew atte Chapel. So that a certain child named Geoffrey Chaucer, who is presumed to be her son, was provided with a stepfather, as his father had been; and may have received in childhood that impression of a transformation-scene of marrying and remarrying, which he extended into vistas of somewhat unscrupulous exaggeration in the career of The Wife of Bath. There are many other complicated controversies about the Chaucer family; but they may be left, first because they cannot be settled; and second because the Chaucer family is not so interesting as Chaucer.

The life of Chaucer, in the somewhat limited sense of the biography of Chaucer, consists of a very few facts and an incredible crowd of fancies. Perhaps it would be fairer to say a crowd of conjectures; for part of the difficulty lies in the plausibility or probability of some of the conjectures, which come near the ground but never quite settle on it. At the very outset, the writer of a sketch of this poet has to decide whether he will confine himself to what he knows to be true, or speculate at length on many things which he can see to be possible, or even probable, but which may, after all (especially in the light of later research), be entirely misleading. I have here decided to dwell definitely only on the definite facts, and to reserve speculation for what must in any case be speculative: the spiritual and philosophical and literary meaning of the story. My reason is that the ramifications of the mere conjectures of the learned have been so vast, and, in some cases, so vain. They are liable to be pursued patiently, or impatiently, through thousands and thousands of words, and then brought to a stop with a few words. In one case I remember, Chaucer went on the wildest adventures in connexion with the revolt of the citizens of London concerning John of Northampton; a story in which the poet fled to Holland, was flung into the Tower, was released by the personal intervention of Anne of Bohemia, was put to thrilling tests involving the betrayal of his fellow-conspirators, before he could reappear in the light of day. To the whole of which story a subsequent biographer put a full stop of scepticism, by saying it was rather odd that through all these changes Chaucer regularly received his pension with his own hands, quite quietly, in his home in London. I am not going to erect towers of tentative theory which can be so rapidly ruined. The romance called 'The Possible Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, Gentleman', would be a most fascinating and spirited work; 'The Black Prince's Treasure'; 'In the House of Wat Tyler'; 'The Rescue of Laura'; 'What Became of Dante's Beatrice?'; or the great mystery story: 'Why Was Chaucer Robbed Twice in One Day?'—as he really was. Doubtless it was mixed up with the Pope or Wycliffe or someone; for the time was picturesque almost to excess: and the great men he may have met would need a volume apiece. But this volume is only about Chaucer; and this chapter is only about the ascertained facts about Chaucer. The trouble is that they are not only few, but they are not even always the few facts that make up the most rudimentary biography.

A good example, to begin with, is the question about the date of his birth. It is largely calculated from the evidence which he gave in the affair of Scrope and Grosvenor; a lawsuit in which he is officially recorded as being 'forty and upwards, and armed twenty-seven years'. This lawsuit was certainly in 1386, so that presuming that Chaucer was then about forty-five, he was probably born about 1341. But it has always struck me as quaintly typical of the time, as well as of the oddity of the Chaucerian problem, that the Court records should be so very exact about the period during which he had borne arms and possessed armorial bearings, and so very vague about the period during which he had been alive. It is possible that Chaucer was himself rather vague, possibly out of natural vagueness, possibly out of natural vanity; but it seems clear that the legal authorities did not trouble to pin him down about his age, when once they were certain about his status of Armiger. That double information, certain on the smaller point and uncertain on the larger, is typical of all the information about Chaucer. There are rather interesting possibilities in such matters, to which I shall refer elsewhere; here I only note in passing that the very date of his birth is doubtful, though the date of his admission into the system of chivalry is clear. The problem of his parentage is in the same lopsided state. It has been traditionally, and apparently truly said (indeed it is substantially certain) that he was the son of a vintner of the City of London; but we do not know this even, so well as we know that he appears later in totally different positions: often the last positions where one would expect the vintner's son to be.

One disadvantage of seeing the same figure in a series of flashes of lightning is that we cannot always be quite certain that it is the same figure. The fact that we have only disjointed bits and snippets of the biography of Geoffrey Chaucer involves the occasional possibility that, in the words of the ancient jest about a more ancient poet, it is not the biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, but of somebody else of the same name. In this connexion we cannot forget what we have already noted: that it was then a fairly common name. Nevertheless, there is a series of such glimpses of what would appear to be a continuous historical personality; though some of them seem to me less certainly, and others quite certainly, the personality of the poet. But whether they are certain or uncertain, they are none of them continuous; they are isolated impressions which can only be treated like separate pictures. The searchlight of criticism can only fall here and there, like a spotlight, upon a particular spot; and that so briefly that we cannot always be equally sure that the human figure which we see is part of the human story which we study.

Thus, the very first figure we see is that of a boy in a short cloak with a pair of black and red breeches, who is hanging about in some more or less menial capacity in the house of the Countess of Ulster, who married Lionel of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward the Third. There is also an entry showing that he received a small sum 'for necessaries at Christmas'; and we will hope that the Countess of Ulster had proper ideas about what a boy's necessaries at Christmas are. But the whole thing was on a small scale, and seems to be suited to quite a subordinate position, and we cannot be absolutely certain that the boy in black and red breeches was father to the man with whom we deal.

Next, we have a much brighter glimpse, in much broader daylight, of a very sharp-eyed and observant young man, probably clad as a scutifer or subordinate and assistant of some knight, walking about among the tents and painted palisades of a medieval camp, gay with heraldry; noticing especially the blazonry of one particular pavilion, and falling into talk with old soldiers or heralds' followers on the subject. The young man was about twenty years old; the time was the year 1359; and the place was the northern plains of France, stretching from the poplars of Picardy to the vines of Champagne, somewhere near the place where the road goes up to the holy towers of Rheims. There is no doubt whatever that this young man is that Galfridus Chaucer who filled up the chinks in his chivalric or bureaucratic duties with a few little literary exercises, admittedly not without merit. The military campaign, in which he was thus serving as a soldier, was one of the last efforts made by Edward the Third in his later years to repeat the success, or recover the crown of glory, which he had won at Crécy long before. About it, as about much of that dying medieval glory, there was an atmosphere of doom. It was probably felt by all that the first English triumphs could not be recovered; though John of Gaunt's grandson was to make yet another very gallant throw for it at Agincourt. Anyhow, it ended in defeat, and Chaucer, fighting in the defeated army, was taken prisoner.

Here, however, we have the first really important light on the level of life, so to speak, on which he was by this time living. He was not only ransomed, but ransomed by a pretty large sum personally advanced by the King. It is clear that he was already a person of some distinction; or at least a person of some promise; and it is most probable that he was connected with the King by the tie of some task or commission, in which his own personality counted. He was still only a young squire, at most; but the Government was certainly employing the young squire on some particular business. In fact, it was a matter of what may be called (in every sense) Intelligence. It was as important then as now to have in the Intelligence Department at least one person of Intelligence. Such a man is valued, and efforts will be made to rescue or to ransom him. It seems clear at least that about the year 1360 and onwards, Chaucer, young as he was, was acting as some sort of King's Messenger or bearer of dispatches between France and England.

In one of these foreign journeys, later on, he became a friend of Froissart; and Froissart is the type of that time and task in his life. Froissart is the historian who really did know everything about chivalry; except the most important thing: that what had turned into a Tournament had once been a Crusade. Courtesy was stooping to courtliness: chivalry was entangled in heraldry; but much of it was still worth learning; and anyhow these were the things the young poet had to learn. I have already said something of that flamboyant background of heraldry against which he stands. It is the vividness of heraldry in those days, and its vagueness in these days, which gives its amusing moral to the little incident that has often been quoted; one of the few living incidents in which the figure of Chaucer can be seen for a moment walking alive in the daylight. It happened, as noted, much later in his life; but it recalls the romantic youth here in question. The fashionable world, as we should put it, was divided into enthusiastic factions over a quarrel which had arisen about the legitimacy of a coat of arms, which then seemed almost as thrilling as the legitimacy of a child or a last will and testament. The arms borne by the great Border family of Scrope, in popular language a blue shield with a gold band across it (I can say 'azure a bend-or' quite as prettily as anybody else) was found to have been also adopted by a certain Sir Thomas Grosvenor, then presumably the newer name of the two. The trial was conducted with all the voluminous detail and seething excitement of a Society divorce case; reams and rolls of it, for all I know, remain, in the records of the heraldic office, for anybody to read if he likes; though I have my doubts even about Garter King-at-Arms. But somewhere in that pile of records there is one little paragraph, for which alone, perhaps, the world would now turn them over at all. It merely states that among a long list of witnesses, one 'Geoffrey Chaucer, gentleman, armed twenty-seven years', had testified that he saw the Golden Bend displayed before Scrope's tent in the battlefield of France; and that long afterwards, he had stopped some people in the streets of London and pointed to the same escutcheon displayed as a tavern sign; whereon they had told him that it was not the coat of Scrope but of Grosvenor. This, he said, was the first time he had ever heard tell of the Grosvenors. Such small flashes of fact are so provocative, that I can almost fancy he smiled as he said the last words.

Perhaps the chief interest of the incident is the reversal of the relations between the witness and the trial; and indeed between the witness and the world. Chaucer at that moment was only of importance because he offered testimony about Scrope and Grosvenor. Scrope and Grosvenor at this moment are only of importance because they elicited testimony from Chaucer. It is an old moral, and obvious enough, that the fashion of this world passes away; yet we often find it hard to believe about the fashion of this age. All that world of the heraldic and the emblematic, full of many very noble meanings as well as many very idle mummeries, has long been rolled away like a scroll and vanished like a cloud; and we cannot conceive that the world once thought all that nonsense necessary. Yet we are not always eager to realize that all which we call necessary may some day be called nonsense. It is amusing to reflect that some day the apocalyptic newspaper files, with their huge headlines about The First Man Who Flew Round The World, or the American professor who thinks we can send wireless waves to Mars, will all seem to our descendants a dust of indescribably dreary triviality; and that nobody will ever look at the long-lost records, except to find a paragraph in a corner, in which Mr. Laurence Binyon or Mr. T. S. Eliot gave evidence about a motor-car collision.

In dealing with all such incidents in Chaucer's life, it is unavoidable that we should have a very little fact to a great deal of theory or hypothesis; because it is impossible to recover the details of his life, but not altogether impossible to recover a good many of the details of his time. His appearance at the great Scrope and Grosvenor inquiry is entirely typical of all we know about him; of his footing among the gentry, which was yet not quite that of a conventional hereditary gentleman; of the confidence that was undoubtedly placed in his word and wisdom, in more important matters than this; of the good sense and clearness which marked all his modes of expression, and would in any case have made him an excellent witness; and even of a certain cheerful curiosity about common things, which made him stop in the street to find out the truth about the new public-house sign. But, on the whole, the difficulty of dealing with the life of Chaucer is that there are so very few of these flashes of daylight, in which the man himself can be seen and snapshotted, moving about on his personal affairs. Almost all we know of him comes from legal documents and official actions; not, as is the case with so many later poets, from contemporary memoirs or personal letters. No man is more personal in his work and more impersonal in his biography. So that, while we can see through his own eyes, with almost startling clearness, the Miller, blind and bloated and roaring with drink, thrusting aside the Monk and making sure of the second place in the series, or the Canon's Yeoman overtaking the cavalcade at a rush, with the foam on his horse's bridle, there was no one present to snapshot the figure of Chaucer himself, as he stood, sharp and observant, outside the blazoned tent in France or the painted tavern in London.

But we do at least know that the rulers observed his observation, and were sharp enough to note his sharpness. He was trusted with diplomatic missions of great dignity, and with some which were, perhaps, too important to be dignified. In other words, it looks as if some of his foreign commissions had been of the nature of what we call Secret Service; and anyhow there is no doubt that he was deep in the secrets of two, if not three Kings. What we know of him publicly through his offices is entirely consonant with what we know of him personally through his poems. If there is one thing that we could have guessed for ourselves, about the personality of the poet, it is that he would have made a perfectly admirable diplomatist. The diplomatist of fiction and drama, especially the diplomatist of melodrama, seems extraordinarily unfitted for diplomacy. He is represented as a rigid and sinister person, with a perpetual sneer, and a background of assassins and the Third Degree. What is wanted in diplomacy is the careful cultivation of the exact contrary of all this; and the exact contrary of all this was Chaucer. The unshaken good temper which was combined with his wide knowledge of the world, his ready realization of the variety of human character, his perfectly genuine geniality towards most people, combined with an equally genuine knowledge of the weaknesses of most people, were exactly the qualities most wanted in that time of tangled feudal claims and touchy semi-dependent vassals. No man ever understood better that it takes all sorts to make a world, or even to make a pilgrimage. No man suffered fools more gladly, for he did actually suffer them gladly; getting any amount of gladness or gaiety out of his private observation of their folly. He was a polished adept in the dangerous diplomatic art of really getting some fun out of funny people.

I shall deal on another page with the details of his political fortunes, the later part of which is admittedly covered with some obscurity. We are not certain of his personal attitude to the palace revolution which replaced the true Plantagenet by the ambitious son of John of Gaunt. We know that John of Gaunt had been in a general sense a patron of Chaucer, as of others; but it is difficult to deduce from this all his individual views about rather unforeseen changes in the next generation. For the purpose of the present problem, it is enough to say that he never ceased to receive a certain amount of reward and protection from the Court; though in his later years he was somewhat poorer and less frequently in public employment. He was not the kind of man to quarrel if he could help it, and, even in those quarrelsome days, none of the rulers seems to have finally or seriously quarrelled with him. The end of their own increasing quarrelsomeness he did not see, but carried with him to the last something of the calmer splendour of the victorious age of Edward. He died before the Wars of the Roses.

I have summarized this chapter under the title of public and private life; and the difficulty is that the poet had a public life that was very much of a private life. Nay, in one sense, it was more private than his private life. We are not in fact told very much about the personal affairs of Geoffrey Chaucer; but what we are told we are told quite frankly. The biography of Chaucer is lost; but it is not hidden. When he does happen to talk about himself, he describes himself quite as vividly as he describes everybody else. He makes fun of himself as he does of everybody else. The description is incomplete, merely because there is not very much of it; and, like most light descriptions of the sort, it does not deal with the most serious matters. But though there is not enough of it to describe a complete person, it does not shrink from being personal, in the sense in which we now speak (generally with grave disapproval) about personalities. Chaucer has told us that he was fat, that he was reluctant to get out of bed, that he was content on occasion to look very much of a fool, that he was thought to neglect his neighbours for his craze for books; and many other things that are quite private and confidential as far as they go. But he has told us nothing of what was really private and confidential: and that was his work in the public service. He was practically by profession a diplomatist; and his diplomacy was a very secret diplomacy. In all his maze of multitudinous words, in all his wandering paths of narrative and meditation, in all the thousand things that he touches on as a poet, a philosopher, a moralist and a humorist, he has not left one single word, I think, which throws any light on those political missions which the King his master trusted him to conduct with the princes of France or the great merchants of Italy. His silence is entirely creditable to him; it was doubtless part of his code of honour as a public servant, especially as a feudal servant; but it is not very helpful to his biographers. A little is known, merely because it was generally known, about the object of some of his journeys abroad; but there are others that seem to me to have been of the Secret Service that is really secret. But this contrast between his ease and gaiety on the subject of himself, and his sobriety and silence on the subject of his business, is very characteristic of the man; and strikes that note of balance, or the power of keeping two different considerations in the mind, which will later be found a clue to deeper things. Chaucer (as has been said) was not so simple as he looked. It would be quite false to say, in modern English, that his simplicity was doubled by duplicity. But it would be quite true to say, in the older Latin, that he was duplex; that is, that he could think about two things at once. This sort of noble and honourable duplicity will later be found relevant to his philosophy and his religion.

But the practical matter, for the moment, is that even his public life was a private life. It is only recorded in a few official entries, and we have to depend upon these, or upon things equally meagre, for much of our speculation about all that was really more private, in the sense of more personal. Perhaps this is most notably the case in the matter of the dates of his poems; a difficult matter which is somewhat doubtfully tested by the foreign influences brought in by his foreign travels. Thus, his work was at one time divided into a French and an Italian period; just as his diplomatic career was divided into a French and an Italian plan of movements. Later discussion has shown a tendency rather to turn on a distinction between the two Italian visits; many believing that it was not until the second that he received anything like the full Italian influence. These matters will be dealt with later, not indeed in detail; for there is little that can be called detail; but with reference to the real differences between his French and English and Italian elements. Here it is sufficient to fix the main facts as they concern a biography, even if it be a literary biography. Chaucer began his career as an envoy in foreign parts with certain negotiations in France, referring probably to the peace after the disastrous war and to other things. In 1367, we find him receiving a pension under the particular title of valettus: a Court office which, quaintly enough, is sometimes translated as Valet and sometimes as Yeoman. It would be hard to find two words which have strayed farther from each other in their subsequent significance. Anyhow, the next glimpse we have of the poet is that of a ceremonial functionary, carrying a torch or lifting a curtain, in the ordinary small rituals that surround royalty. But it is plain that this was only a sort of interlude, and his missions to France were soon followed by the first of his missions to Italy. It involved his going abroad, apparently alone, with a little money and some letters of exchange; and its full object perhaps will never be known. In 1372 he went to parley with two citizens of Genoa about a port in England suitable to the Genoese trade. It is much debated, among Chaucerian critics, whether the great enthusiasm he certainly showed later for Italian literature came to him through this first visit; but the best authorities now seem to think that all the really valuable 'Italianate' work was done after the second visit in 1378. Anyhow, his first important work, which is not Italianate at all, was the lament over the Duchess who was the wife of John of Gaunt: and the question of his relation to the House of Lancaster would suffice to bring us back to more practical and personal elements in his own life.

Among the very scrappy scraps that historians have had to piece together, there is mention in the year 1366 of a certain Philippa Chaucer being one of the attendants of the Queen. She was granted a pension, and later on we find the pension being paid through her husband Geoffrey Chaucer. This has given rise to endless disputes and difficulties; ranging from the suggestion that Geoffrey had revived the family fancy for Chaucers marrying Chaucers, and married a cousin of the same surname, to a deep and delicate dispute about whether he could possibly have been married in 1366, when a poem written about that year expresses the sentiment of a disappointed lover. Leaving the latter point for a moment, we may note that the theory of any close cousinship involves a non-existent dispensation from Rome, and in any case does not seem necessary. The alternative theory favoured is that he married Philippa de Roet; and if he did, a really interesting situation arises.

If he did, it would seem that two strides, both almost accidental, really took him into a world far above his own. For it so happened, merely by chance, that Philippa de Roet's sister was engaged in John of Gaunt's family as a governess; it seems too probable that she became John of Gaunt's mistress; and it is quite certain that she eventually became his wife. She was his third wife; and men at that stage have often something a little senile about their sentiment. But something seems to tell us that she must have been rather a remarkable woman, whether in a pleasant or an unpleasant fashion; and it seems not altogether unlikely that some remarkable qualities ran in the family. Perhaps there was also something remarkable about her sister Philippa, that attracted the attention of the most subtle judge of character in that age. But beyond that, there seems very little material for judgment. What is much more to the point is, however, that if this identification be true, Chaucer had one wild leap of luck apart from all his services. By a sort of mésalliance nobody could have foreseen, the vintner's son became something very like a brother-in-law of the Blood Royal.

The present writer is prayerfully conscious that he was never meant to be a biographer; not having that eye for detail which can trace a tenable theory among many doubts. On the other hand, if unlearned in the more recondite documents, he has in his time studied about one thousand detective-stories, and is often struck by the resemblance between the ingenuity of their authors and the ingenuity of the learned biographers. The true biographer hunts down a hero as the romantic detective hunts down a villain; tracking him, so to speak, by lost buttons and cigarette-ends; deducing his designs from his slightest scribbles or scraps of paper; drawing hints from eavesdropping on his most casual conversational remarks. Unfortunately, there is a fallacy in transferring these talents to the task of biography. A decent detective-story is itself a selected bundle of clues, with a few blinds as carefully selected as the clues. If therefore the reader, or his romantic detective, finds that somebody has made a note of the latest train to Market Harborough, or observes somebody else wave his hat towards a particular window with a striped green blind, he knows that these things have some connexion, however obscure or remote, with the great problem of who hanged Admiral Bundleton with his own bootlaces. But when we are dealing with the whole life of a real human being, and trying to trace its outstanding events, it is not in the least necessary, it is not in the least likely, that all the trivial incidents or allusions will refer to outstanding events. Many of them will refer to things that nobody can possibly discover, after five hundred years; many to things that were next to nothing even at the time; some actually to nothing at all. But some of the illustrious Chaucerian scholars, to whom the world owes such everlasting thanks for elucidating the text and many of the true facts, sometimes seem to be unable to realize this reality. They cannot believe that they are not sleuths, following a trail that was laid for them and cunningly darting upon clues that they were meant to see. Whatever Chaucer does or says, however idly or carelessly, can be taken down and used in evidence against him. Everything that could be an expression of his private feelings is supposed to refer to his private life. Anything, that could be twisted into the expression of an intention, must be an intention that he seriously entertained; anything like an intention that he seriously entertained must be an intention that he actually carried out. If he says anything, anywhere, in any connexion, referring to marriage, he must be referring to his own marriage. If he says, after writing a tragedy, that he would rather like to write a comedy, it must be some comedy that he actually wrote. If he should happen to say, or even happen to make one of his characters say, that he does not like the subject of some story, it must mean that he does not like a particular rival poet, who happens to have told the story. If he makes one of his characters claim to have gone somewhere where he himself actually went, then the fictitious character must be meant for a portrait of himself. This sort of hunting for hints is wonderfully exciting and very profitable and edifying—in murder-stories. But it is not human; and it has no relation to real human life. And when they come to what is in fact the very foggiest and most fanciful phase of human nature, young love and sentiment about the other sex, they become all the more ruthlessly like policemen on the pounce.

Chaucer wrote a poem, apparently an early poem, called 'An Exclamation of the Death of Pity'. It is all about a young gentleman being in love with a young lady, and talking about her to various other people, allegorical and otherwise, in the medieval manner; and complaining especially that pity is dead and there is no hope of the fulfilment of his dream; which certainly seems a rather dreamy sort of dream. But the most elaborate scaffolding of scientific dates and details has been erected on this chance metrical exercise of Chaucer; calculations about when he was married; about whether it could have been written after he was married; about whether, in that case, it proves that he was unhappily married; calculations about the date of his falling in love, the date of his falling out of love, and (of course) the exact identity of the only possible lady whom he could ever have loved. I may be very irresponsible, but all this seems to me to be extraordinarily wide of the mark, touching a man's actual life in this vale of tears. I should imagine that there never was a man, not actually convinced of a vocation of virginity somewhere about the age of seven, who had not had enough in the way of day-dreams and dallyings to have written such sentimental verse by the age of seventeen. Sentimental verse of that sort has been written about a total stranger; about a face seen in a crowd; about a person who did not exist at all. Yet all this subjective side of youthful poetry seems to be entirely forgotten, because we are trying to make an objective biography of Chaucer out of any objects lying about; as the buttons and cigarettes lie about in the murder-story.

Now the fact is that youthful brooding is so subjective that it hardly even needs a subject. Certainly its literary self-expression can often be quite easily transferred to another subject. The poet preserves what the lover has forgotten; and many a famous love-poem may have been begun about one lady and finished about another. The time at which it was published is no clue to the time at which it was written. The time at which it was written is no clue to the theme that it was written about. Save in a few very vivid and personal examples, the theme may have even begun and ended in thought. And it seems to me very unfair to Mrs. Geoffrey Chaucer to deduce, in a detective manner, that her husband was unhappy with her; or that her husband was unfaithful to her; or indeed that there was anything whatever the matter with either of them, from anything so flimsy as the fact that her husband is the author of some rather artificial love-verses, that he might have written to anybody at any time, or touched up at any time, or decided to publish at any time.

Some of the other evidences that have been found before now, by detectives hovering round the Chaucer household, are much more ridiculous than this. Somebody found a confession of domestic tragedy in the fact that Chaucer confessed that he was a little liable to be cross with the voice that woke him up too early in the morning. This may have been a tribute to his dreams, though more probably to his taste for dreamless sleep; but it can hardly be regarded as a very definite and detailed criticism of his daily or domestic life. As to the hundred and one jests and jeers that are thrown throughout his works at women or wives or marriage, they do not differ from the ordinary conventional joke of Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, or the picture of any henpecked husband in Punch, except in being much more refined. For the author of the Miller's Tale was refined. That is, he could be refined; and a good many modern writers are most coarse and clumsy when they intend to be refined. These jokes certainly prove nothing either way about the happiness of his marriage. Such jokes have been made by hundreds and thousands of happy and unhappy husbands, and fill all the libraries of the world. The people who write them think they are funny; they write them because they think they are funny; not because they describe exactly the facts of their own private lives. There seems, in short, to be a curious oblivion of the purely literary reasons for literature. Poetry generally comes out of the poet's life, as distinct from his biography; not out of what he did, but of what he thought when he was doing nothing; not out of the self that he expressed in working or wiving or flirting, but of the self that he could only express in writing. Certainly he does not sit down and keep a diary in verse, with all the details relevant and realistic. That is not the way poetry is written. But it seems to be the way biography is written.

I therefore delicately deprecate the idea of biographers thus appearing as detectives; especially as that not very superior sort of detective employed to collect evidence for a divorce between Mr. and Mrs. Chaucer, five hundred years after their death. I do not know whether Mr. and Mrs. Chaucer were happy or unhappy. Apparently it has not occurred to our bright psychologists that they were probably both. There seems to be a certain lack of vividness in envisaging what marriage is like, as well as what poetry is like. But, as Professor Pollard has justly said, what evidence there is rather points to Chaucer having been both happier and more religious and respectable while his wife was alive than afterwards. It is more to the point that he was apparently poorer afterwards. Which may be rather a compliment to the wife.

I have said that I attach very little importance to the merely exclamatory or flippant phrases, on which the theory of the poet's conjugal tragedy has been based. It is a good rough rule with Chaucer to translate him into modern English, or a parallel modern passage. The passage about his wife waking him up might be rendered more or less correctly thus: 'A voice woke me up, rather as somebody I needn't mention very often does wake me up; but then, you see, the voice was very mild or gentle, so I knew it wasn't my wife.' That remark might pass in the patter of any comedian, or the half-impersonal confessions of any comic writer, without being supposed to throw any very blazing or blasting light on the actual misery of his actual marriage. And this is perhaps the most positive and pointed of the purely literary allusions that have been used for this purpose. But it is only right to add that there is one piece of actual record, that is not merely a piece of literature or a lark, which can be interpreted in the sense that the poet had been practically misbehaving himself. It is a rather mysterious legal document in which a young woman named Cecilia de Chaumpaigne releases a Geoffrey Chaucer from his legal liability in some charge of abducting or eloping. It is quite possible, of course, that the matter was concerned with some real wrong, though this does not fully explain it. The woman presumably had some reason for having once involved Chaucer (if it was Chaucer) in the affair. It is equally true, on that argument, that she presumably had some reason for releasing him from it. The best Chaucerian authorities seem to think that it was not exactly a personal matter, but part of one of those curious family conspiracies for getting hold of people and marrying them to other selected people, which were rather a recurrent scandal in those times; in one case of which Chaucer's own father had been the victim. Quite apart from morality, in which any man may fail, it was not at all typical of Chaucer's temperament to engage in any personal or isolated violence or lawlessness; and it is certainly the only mark of the sort against his name. It is possible that he might play something like the part of Pandarus to some Troilus in his own marrying and remarrying family; it seems more probable that he would play the part of mentor or moderator; hence, possibly, the special pardon to himself. There may have been almost any sort of complicated comedy of relations; there may have been simply a bad break and nothing else. The incident forms the most thrilling and entertaining chapter in that Possible Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, which I am not writing and do not intend to write.

We have seen that Chaucer's first Italian mission was to Genoa; it has been conjectured that he went from there to Padua, where it would have been possible for him to meet, as he certainly would have wished to meet, the most famous and in one sense the first poet of the age. Petrarch was in Padua at the end of 1372; and there is certainly something at least like a coincidence in the fact that he was then turning into Latin the same story of Griselda which Chaucer later turned into English. This (if one may say so) seems to me a good example of the difference between reasonable and unreasonable deduction from our fragmentary documents. There is a real objective concrete coincidence or convergence of facts, or at any rate approximation of facts, in Chaucer, Genoa, Padua, Petrarch and Griselda, plus the fact that the Clerk of Oxford, in telling the tale of Griselda, actually mentions Petrarch and Padua. Any one of these things might happen without any connexion; but it is odd that they were all connected. But when people pass from this to saying that Chaucer must have meant the Clerk of Oxford for himself, or rather a double of himself (seeing that he already happened to be present in his own person), and when they mix up Chaucer's gossiping greediness for all sorts of books with the concentration on Aristotle which is a part of the character of the Oxford Schoolman and philosopher, they go a great deal too fast and indulge in fancy. No two Canterbury Pilgrims can ever be confused for a moment; and the Clerk of Oxford is the Clerk of Oxford, and Chaucer is very emphatically Chaucer. Nevertheless, Chaucer was interested in philosophy; besides being, in a really natural sense, a natural philosopher.

It is very possible therefore that Chaucer did here enter for the first time into that golden air of the Roman culture that was soon to be the golden air of the Renaissance; at the gates of which, crowned with laurel, stood great Petrarch clad in gold. That was how he seemed, at least, to his contemporaries to stand; and Chaucer certainly did not fail to admire him, however soon or late he began to imitate him; but he seems to have admired Dante more, though he could hardly be expected to imitate him better. Whether there be any connexion or no between the two turns of his fate, it is certain that the mission to Italy was like a golden gate for the practical prosperity of Chaucer. His real period of wealth, public importance and (it is fair to add) public industry, stretches from that St. George's Day in 1374, when the great English poet received from the English King the highly symbolic pitcher of wine (which he afterwards turned into a pension), right away past the death of King Edward in 1377 to the time of the revolt of Gloucester in the councils of his grandson. In the summer of the same year he became Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins and Tanned Hides in the Port of London, and his salary seems to have been augmented by a variety of other payments, in a rather patchwork fashion; by a pension from John of Gaunt; two ward ships which carried remuneration, and a special grant from the King on some wool forfeited for non-payment of duty. He then went on another foreign mission to Flanders, of a smaller and secret sort, and we find that in such cases he was allowed to appoint deputies for his official work. But, in the ordinary way, he was a good hard-working official. It is apparent in everything, from such details as we know about the work itself to the particular tone of the relief he expresses at having balanced his ledgers and gone back to his books. In that way he was a good business man; though perhaps rather of the type that is a better business man for his employers than for himself. It is a type not uncommon among good-tempered, abstracted, secretly imaginative men; the type that goes on for years as an excellent Government Office clerk, but when once it is superannuated and at leisure, is not always wise in dealing with its own hobbies or investments. There has been much talk about whether the breakdown in Chaucer's fortunes, and the relative poverty that fell upon him, was entirely due to the later political accident which turned him for a time out of office. It has been suggested, for instance, that a hobby of Astrology, accompanied by a more expensive hobby of Alchemy, ran away with a great deal of his money. In this connexion only two facts can be noted in a mere skeleton of facts like the present. First, Chaucer seems to have had a son named Lewis; presumably by Philippa Chaucer, who is thought to have died about 1387. Chaucer wrote for his son a little treatise on the Astrolabe, treating that scientific instrument very much as a toy, and definitely stating that, whatever there may be in astronomy, there is precious little in astrology. This has been held to refer to a grievance against such medieval experiments. But it seems to me quite sufficiently explained by the fact that Chaucer was a Christian and a Catholic, with plenty of common sense and an acquiescence in the Church's protest against the superstitions of fatalism and doom. Even if he had not been sensible enough to be orthodox on that subject, a man of his nature would certainly be specially orthodox when writing something for his own child. That might not have prevented him playing the fool with sham sciences himself; but the thing is quite unproved. The other proof offered is the very violent explosion against the fraud and rascality of Alchemy in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, which sounds to some good critics like the real recital of a real wrong. We cannot tell whether Chaucer had this experience; we can be quite certain that he had this conviction.

His second Italian mission first arrests the attention by bringing in certain figures who counted for a good deal, either in life or literature. We find here certainly, for the first time, that he was a close friend of his famous contemporary, the poet Gower; for he left Gower as a deputy to look after his affairs. Here we have another of these typical fancies, that have hardened into theories; the theory of the broken friendship and subsequent quarrel of the two medieval poets. Their relation is of some historical interest, but this sort of guesswork is very unhistorical. We can only speculate on the friendship. Chaucer was a man for whom the world teemed with quiet fun, as it says in the comic opera; and I have often wondered whether he felt the full irony of the patronage to which men such as he are subject. I do not mean the royal or feudal patronage, which was simply a part of the social order of the time, which a sensible man of his type would probably accept as we accept policemen or postmen. It was considered part of the province of a prince to support artists and such odd people; and, though the thing had obvious abuses, there was something to be said for it, if we compare it in all aspects with the problem of the best-seller or the man who starves in Fleet Street. But I mean that more subtle patronage that is extended to poets by poets, and not by patrons. There is always something a little quaint in that relation of the rich artist and the poor artist; or the old artist and the young artist; or the successful artist and the other who is not as yet successful. It is recorded with rather savage irony in Mr. Belloc's sketch of 'The Good Poet and the Bad Poet'. Remember that Hayley as a poet, and not merely Hayley as a squire, was in a position to patronize Blake. There is a grim humour in the fact that a man like Swift felt bound to mention a man like Temple as a literary leader, and not merely as a social protector. The practical patrons of Chaucer did not, so far as I know, appear also as the rivals of Chaucer. At least I never heard of John of Gaunt dropping into poetry; or Henry of Bolingbroke capping The Canterbury Tales with a little thing of his own. But the thing has more subtle forms when it comes from the seniors of the school of letters; from those who are, for any reason, considered more established, or more learned, or more in the official limelight, than a mere stray genius. I have always felt that there was a touch of this in the attitude of Ben Jonson to Shakespeare. I am pretty sure there was a touch of it in the attitude of Gower to Chaucer.

John Gower seems to have had a vaguely national or official function, which was never entirely accorded to Chaucer, for all his laureateship and his butt of sack. Shakespeare, following some tradition of tragedy, and more especially of morality, uses the name for the funereal figure appearing before the curtain as a Prologue or prophet of woe and wisdom, to draw all the proper morals from the historical plays; as if it were the name of the licensed and labelled moralist of English literature. Chaucer addresses him as, 'O moral Gower', distinguishing him, in a departmental manner, from 'the philosophical Strode', whose province was presumably philosophy. But the delicate difference of tone appears when we pass from what Chaucer said to Gower to what Gower said to Chaucer. Gower was thoroughly friendly; entirely affable. He says that Chaucer is his poet; but he also says that Chaucer is his disciple and even 'his own clerk', who has taken down many of his thoughts, perhaps in somewhat lighter language. And in his doubtless sincere compliment to Chaucer's verse, we have exactly the same suggestion as that made by many graver poets about Shakespeare and his warbling of wood-notes:

Of dytees and of songes glade
The whiche he for my sake made.

One would not say that the graver poets disapprove of cheerfulness in the minor poets; but they mention it. Chaucer, like Matthew Arnold in Max's caricature, was not at all times wholly serious. Without claiming to have read every line and word of the moral Gower, which would be a boast of no little hardihood, I suspect that he was, for the most part, wholly serious. When I hint that it is barely possible that Chaucer saw some humour in all this, I do not mean to discredit the view that the two poets were friends. They were both, in their way, men of good will, and one of them was conspicuously a man of good humour. That sort of friendship need not go wrong, unless both the friends treat it wrongly. Blake abused Hayley like a pickpocket; but then Blake was as hard to please as Hayley was tactless in pleasing. Chaucer was not at all hard to please. It is written all over his work that he was very easy to please. George Macdonald finely said that God is easy to please and hard to satisfy; and there is something of that in many great men. I can believe that Chaucer was pleased with Gower's patronage, though I rather doubt if he was satisfied with Gower's poetry.

These being the human and rather humorous probabilities of the case, the ingenious melodrama of the mortal quarrel of the poets has apparently been made up merely out of one chance remark in The Canterbury Tales. It is the characteristic remark of Chaucer that he dislikes stories of which the subject is some horrible perversion or monstrosity; he mentions one such legend, which does happen to have been dealt with by Gower. We can only say that this might conceivably have led to a quarrel; but I can find no direct evidence that it ever did. To say it could only have been written because of a quarrel seems to me simple nonsense. For the rest, Gower's place in the biography is that of the friend whom Chaucer left to represent him when he went to Italy for the second time: that second visit which introduced him to other historical persons of importance; notably to Bernabo Visconti of Milan, whose tragedy attracted the sympathy of Chaucer, as remains recorded in the Monk's Tale. He was not long in Italy this time, but most critics hold that he saw more books and manuscripts and received then his real introduction to Italian letters. There seems to follow an expanding leisure and importance at home; he was given a new Comptrollership; he was able to appoint a permanent deputy for his old Comptrollership, and in the same year, 1385, he was made a Justice of the Peace for Kent, and in the following year a Member of Parliament, as Knight of the Shire for Kent. Thus he seems to settle down and spread himself in that very English landscape through which he and his great company will ride for ever; when there came the sharp turn in his destiny and something even like disaster.

Richard the Second, the grandson of the old King, had come to the throne as a mere boy; though a rather remarkable boy, to judge by the presence of mind and instinct, at once princely and popular, with which in his boyhood he faced and pacified the Peasant Rising. But he naturally suffered from uncles; generally either from John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, or from his other uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Lancaster went abroad, leaving his protégés unprotected; Gloucester seized the power and almost the person of the young King, and in the overturn Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer lost all his comfortable jobs, which were given to the Gloucester party. There follow clear indications that he had fallen on evil days. He obtains protection for a year against being sued for debts; he sells some of his pensions for cash down. Relatively to his previous prosperity, his comparative poverty seems to have continued till his death. But relatively to these first pressing years of poverty, immediately after Gloucester's palace revolution, he makes a very considerable recovery; and seems to have received royal help once more, whenever he really required it. For Richard the Second, a year after he had become a man, determined to become a King. He suddenly rent the rod of office from Gloucester; summoned back John of Gaunt, and resumed that sort of rule which Victorian historians always called despotic, especially when it was slightly democratic. The effects of this, and of his ultimate fall, on English history were very great and have been considered elsewhere. But the effects on Geoffrey Chaucer were very practical and consoling; for he was appointed Clerk of the Works in the repairing of the greatest public buildings: the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster, and St. George's Chapel at Windsor. He was later made a commissioner for the repair of high-roads, and though these jobs did not last indefinitely, he was never entirely neglected after the return of John of Gaunt. Richard the Second gave him a new pension in 1394, and later a tun of wine. Fortunately, also, even the fall of King Richard, which changed so many things, did not change this partial recovery of Chaucer's more moderate prosperity. Whatever else Henry Bolingbroke was, he was John of Gaunt's son, and had no quarrel with his father's old poet. He sent him a fresh pension in response to the humorous melancholy of the poet's 'Complaint to his Purse'; and with this Chaucer passed his last days in peace. But his last days had come. He died just after he had moved into a house near St. Mary's Chapel, from which he is said to have looked out in his last hours on the gardens and the great roof of the Abbey.

More than one portrait of Chaucer remains to give a general idea of his appearance, though that was the time of the first beginnings of portraiture in paint, at least in this country, as Chaucer himself may be called the beginning of portrait-painting in literature. The pictures we have represent him as he was in later life, when the Host of the Tabard chaffed him on his stoutness. It would be interesting to have an earlier impression, touching the days when he was light on his feet, and knew fighting and foreign travel, yet had already what was called his elvish face and the pleasant shyness that covered so much sharpness. The best existing portrait is that published by the poet Occleve, to illustrate one of his own poems. It shows the head in a black hood against a green ground; two tufts of grey beard and a wisp of whitish hair rather recall, at least to modern associations, the elvish comparison; but the face is sober and benevolent, not without something of that sleepiness touched with slyness, that is the mood of much of his later work. Red cords on his dress support writing materials and he appears to be carrying a rosary; at least, as it is certainly a string of beads, it seems most likely that it is a rosary. For I cannot suppose that Chaucer's quarrel with the Friar, even if it went to the point of assault and battery, would have prevented him from carrying what has been called the Layman's Breviary, devoted to the Virgin to whom he had so much devotion, merely because the instrument happens to have been invented by St. Dominic. However that may be, the portrait is unmistakably a portrait; the person unmistakably a person. And it is easy to imagine the old man, in much that habit and condition, pottering about the Gothic lanes of Westminster, until he died, almost to a day (it is conjectured), coincidently with the death of the flamboyant, toppling and tottering fourteenth century.

He was buried, as we all know, in Westminster Abbey; the first of the poets to lie in Poets' Corner. There have been differences about the tomb, of late Gothic design, that still covers his bones; but it is certainly so far a genuinely Gothic thing, that it is the only thing in that Corner that suggests the idea of a corner. The more modern monuments do not suggest the sort of persons who would be content in any case to remain in corners. Even if it were erected much later, and not in the best medieval manner, it is so far medieval that it does suggest that the buried man is buried; not that he is impatiently and prematurely resurrected before the Resurrection. Even here we feel something of that communis sententia, or medieval common sense; which was so much less rhetorical, and therefore so much more really rational, than the rational eighteenth century. Few will deny that the figures which fill the Abbey to-day, mostly the relics of the eighteenth century, are in their nature rather rhetorical. I do not mind such rhetoric in its place; but I doubt if its place is a Gothic church, and I think it is made to look rather silly by the silent presence of the Gothic tomb. The latter seems to say, in the language of a simpler time, that Galfridus Chaucer had lived his life, and this monument commemorated his death; and that, salve fide, there was an end of it. He had swaggered a little in his day, and that cheerfully and pleasantly; but he does not swagger solemnly in his death. He had served in arms, and been among swords and soldiers; but he does not stand wildly waving a sabre and bestriding a cannon, like General Sir Peveril Potts, whose services in the campaign before the Peace of Utrecht will leap to all our memories. He had done his best for his country in diplomatic negotiations with foreigners, and settled several questions of royal ransoms or marriages of considerable importance in their day; but he does not stand grasping a scroll or pointing to a map like the Right Hon. Benjamin Buffle, whose patriotic virtues have boiled over from his tomb in billows of bloated marble. He had written a little thing or two that some have admired; but he does not lean elegantly on an urn or look up at a laurel or invoke an invisible Muse, as does the immortal Timmins, whose works were so widely read by the fashionable world in the Age of Reason. He does not strike any attitudes as do the varied representatives of that remarkable company; including, I believe, five or six professional politicians and one butler; probably the most respectable person present. He does not offer any remarks, by means of post-mortem pantomime or sculptured signal or gesticulation. He lies prostrate as when death struck him down; in the last dark instant when he cried upon Christ.