V. The Canterbury Tales

To watch the unfolding of the genius of Chaucer is to watch a pattern changing into a picture; or into a series of pictures. It is something like the illusion of a sick or sleepy child, staring at a wall-paper, for whom the flat plants seem to branch and blossom, or figures to begin to move among the formal trees. His work begins with the purely rhythmic decorative style that possessed medieval prose and verse, even more than medieval painting and carving. It ends with something more than the realism of Renaissance pictures; with something suggestive of the realism of modern novels. There is even a sort of paradox in it; that in his vigorous and adventurous youth he was formal; in his comparatively crippled and limited old age he was free. When he was a young soldier, fighting sword in hand against the spears of France, or a young traveller and political agent, dealing with delicate crises in the cities of Italy, his style of writing was still as rigid a pattern as the prison-bars that enclosed Palamon and Arcite. When he was something more like a shabby old pensioner, stout of body and lean of purse, limited, as it were, to the view from his own lattice looking towards the Abbey and his own future grave, he broke out into a dance of lively and dramatic detail that reminds us rather of Dickens or of Balzac. We see him gradually breaking those flowery chains of his youth, and then living to sow such very wonderful wild oats in his old age. It is in itself an inspiriting sight, and the outline of a gallant story. But, for all that, we must not exaggerate one side of the matter, or imagine that he merely escaped from a prison to a free hostelry and highway, when he fled from the House of Fame to the Tabard in Southwark.

For instance, it is well to remember that the purely medieval Chaucer has been an inspiration, even more, if possible, than the purely personal Chaucer. Art critics are now everywhere returning to that medieval sense of rhythm in art, and many literary men, long before, returned to it in literature. William Morris was a Socialist and in his time a typically modern man; what is very much more important, he was a typically manly man. He was eminently sane, hearty and healthy; and his broad face and leonine beard were in a sort of symbolic way felt as types of freedom and fraternity. But the Chaucer who inspired Morris was the Chaucer of the long elaborate pageants and allegories; even more than the Chaucer of the last brief excursion into the coarse comedies of daily life. A man wandering through the coloured corridors and labyrinths of the long decorative tales of The Earthly Paradise does sometimes feel a little like a fly crawling across a wallpaper. But that paper is a fly-paper that has attracted a good many flies. A Cambridge professor of chemistry whom I knew, a man whose whole main business was material modern science, had for his whole conception of a hobby or a holiday an endless journey in those realms of gold from the Glittering Plain to The Wood At The End Of The World. Mr. George Moore, who still manages to be a modern man of our time as well as his own, delights above all things in the decorative poetry of Morris; especially in the most meaningless parts of it, like the recurrent emblem of 'two red roses across the moon'. Now nearly all this inspiration was drawn, not only from Chaucer, but from the early romantic Chaucer as distinct from the later realistic Chaucer. If the hero of Troilus and Criseyde seems to be an unconscionable long time dying, the hero of The Life and Death of Jason also seems a little leisurely in his life and slow in getting to his death.

The moral is obvious enough; that what we call the length and even the monotony of medieval literature is a human pleasure and a human need, in certain moods and moments of mankind. It lay like an infinite inviting sea in the background of the fourteenth century. It returned like a refreshing and copious flood to the dry and dusty respectability of the nineteenth century. And, in the case of Chaucer, our very admiration for his later discoveries may make us exaggerate the futility of the traditions he inherited. Sir Topas may create a false perspective, rather as Don Quixote creates a partly unjust retrospect. Readers infer from the novel of Cervantes that the old romances were all rubbish; though Cervantes goes out of his way to explain that they were not. Readers may remember the name of Sir Topas as a satire on chivalry, though in fact it follows on a very noble exaltation of chivalry in the person of the real Knight; the Knight who is without a name. Something of the same irony may even be found in the lives of the two men of genius. For Chaucer, who travesties Topas, had figured in armour and armorial bearings in the most florid period of the wars of chivalry; the terrible tourney of the Leopards against the Lilies. And Cervantes, credited with despising and destroying romance, had himself lived one of the most wildly romantic lives in history; escaping from slavery among the Paynims of Africa, and wielding a sword and losing a hand in the deathless death-grip of Lepanto.

There is, then, something to be said for the long poetical allegories eventually abandoned by Chaucer; as for the long prose romances ultimately satirized by Cervantes. Their very extension and expanse satisfied a psychological need now perhaps only felt by children and poor people, who like to have a very big book for their money. Yet there are few cultivated moderns who have not felt something of the pleasure of being able to lose themselves in the longest books of Dickens or Trollope. But there is more in it than that; for man lives by his devouring appetite for morality. The chivalric romance does really represent the Christian conception of life, which is at once a Quest, a Test and an Adventure. And the decorative allegories, that seem so dead to us, were once alive like a dance with the balanced morality of the Middle Ages.

Dante makes the very heavens dance, in the last pages of the Paradiso; sweeping the sky with swaying and spinning ballets of angels and spirits; and the symbol is very appropriate to the philosophy. It is appropriate; not because the dance stands for disorder, but because it stands for order. The dance is in its nature a rhythmic and recurrent thing, returning upon itself; and was therefore a perfectly correct and orthodox type of medieval moral theology. This, by the way, will be noted by the intelligent as correcting the exaggerated solemnity, with which some scholars have taken the tirades of fanatical friars, and other people, against the use or abuse of dancing. Doubtless there was much that was really pagan left in popular dancing, and doubtless there were plenty of donkeys in holy orders who found paganism in what was not really pagan. But in face of a fact like Dante's vision of the celestial dance, it is not tenable that the medieval mind thought of dancing merely as immorality or indecency. Nobody would describe people as doing in heaven what he had a deep and indignant horror of their doing on earth. Mahomet would not describe his Paradise as a place where the faithful were incessantly occupied in carving and worshipping idols. The Pacifist would not point happily to a future life in which everybody would be always waving sabres and firing off guns; the Prohibitionist would not picture heaven as a state of perfection in which the blessed could drink rum and gin for ever and ever. And Dante would not have filled the skies with dancing, if he had instinctively thought of the dance as degrading. The truth is, of course, that he instinctively thought of the dance as decorative and rhythmic, and therefore corresponding to a certain character in his whole conception of life. Indeed, it marks the whole difference between medieval life and modern life.

A certain break or sharp change in history can hardly be sketched more sharply, than by saying that up to a certain time life was conceived as a Dance, and after that time life was conceived as a Race. Medieval morality was full of the idea that one thing must balance another, that each stood on one side or the other of something that was in the middle, and something that remained in the middle. There might be any amount of movement, but it was movement round this central thing; perpetually altering the attitudes, but perpetually preserving the balance. The Virtues were like children going round the Mulberry Bush, only the Mulberry Bush was that Burning Bush which they made symbolical of the Incarnation; that flamboyant bush in which the Virgin and Child appear in the picture, with Rene of Provence and his beloved wife kneeling on either side. Now since that break in history, whatever we call it or whatever we think of it, the Dance has turned into a Race. That is, the dancers lose their balance and only recover it by running towards some object, or alleged object; not an object within their circle or their possession, but an object which they do not yet possess. It is a flying object; a disappearing object; and, as some hold, a disappointing object. But I am not concerned with condemning or commending either the religion of the Race or the religion of the Dance. I am only pointing out that this is the fundamental difference between them. One is rhythmic and recurrent movement, because there is a known centre; while the other is precipitate or progressive movement, because there is an unknown goal. The latter has produced all that we call Progress; the former produced what the medievals meant by Order; but it was the lively order of a dance.

When we understand this dance, we understand the order or pattern of the early poems of Chaucer; and above all why he does not seem to be in any hurry to finish them. Judged by our higher standards of hustle and pep, the Canterbury Pilgrims do not seem to be in a very great hurry to get to Canterbury. But they are like American tourists in the pace they observe, in getting to the pilgrims' goal, compared with the pace of Pandarus or Phoebus in getting to the point. But this leisurely quality is bound up in the very nature of the work, or play. A dance is a thing enjoyable in itself, and given such a dance of gods and heroes, it can go on for ever. A journey, if it is enjoyable on account of its object, is not equally enjoyable if it goes on for ever. I know that some moderns have tried to confuse at once the metaphor and the mind, by pretending that the joy of the journey is in something that can never be enjoyed. But this is a confusion. If they could express themselves clearly, they would either say that the journey is itself the goal, or else that the journey is hopeless and only an illusion makes it hopeful. Otherwise, they are out on a tramp that has no end, to find an inn that has no existence. The more reasonable progressives profess to envisage an end of some kind, and when praising the goal naturally tend to foreshorten the journey. These are the authors of Utopias and plans of perfect social reform. But the poet, who is describing a dance of virtues, or a pageant of beauty, has naturally no particular impatience that this should itself end. And something of this lingering love of his own day-dream unduly prolongs his own description. It has the effect, especially for modern readers, of making much of such medieval writing dull. But even if we find it dull, let us not suppose it was the product of dullness, when it was the product of delight.

Of course, even these early works of Chaucer, on the old medieval model, are of very varying merit. The Book of the Duchess is a very affecting, because a relatively young and innocent, version of human grief; The Parlement of Foules has already more of the freedom of the fable about cocks and hens; The Legend of Good Women has moments in which it almost turns into a graver though certainly not greater Canterbury Tales; and the tale of Troilus and Criseyde, though to us inordinately long, has high and magnificent passages that are worth the toil of reading anything ten times longer. The point here, however, is that there is a sort of break in the story of Chaucer's style, and that the break came comparatively late in his story. He probably regarded the tale of Troilus as his supreme work, and the Canterbury Pilgrimage as a more casual postscript. His masterpiece is a kind of afterthought.

It might be maintained that, in the very act of leading his coloured crowd out of the Tabard and the town, and along the open road, Chaucer symbolized something of the change from the medieval balance to the modern march; from the philosophy of the Dance to the philosophy of the Race. Few modern racing men, fewer still among modern racing motorists, will regard the journey as much of a sporting event. Few journeys have a greater air of leisure; and nobody, certainly, will suggest that it was a race in which the best man was meant to win. The fact that the Reeve always rode at the tail of the procession will be sufficiently balanced by the fact that the Miller apparently rode at the head of it. Here at least the medieval poet can have meant no allegory of spiritual superiority. But there is also a serious element in the idea of the Canterbury Pilgrimage which makes the Pilgrims' Way something more than merely the open road. So far as having a definite purpose is concerned, the Pilgrim of Chaucer is as genuine as the Pilgrim of Bunyan. He is not in such a hurry because he is not in such a horrible fright; and there is no question of the Franklin or the Squire putting his fingers in his ears and fleeing from London as from a City of Destruction. But he is none the less really fleeing to Canterbury as a City of Salvation. Anyhow, he is not merely wishing to escape into the wilderness and leave all cities behind. I shall discuss in a moment the really new element which the poet half consciously introduced into his long comedy of travel; the element of delay, or what a medieval man would have called dalliance. But though he admits a good many things besides pilgrimage and piety on this side of Canterbury, he does not admit anything beyond Canterbury. His scheme of travel is still dominated by the idea of a definite purpose, and the fresh forces which entered literature at this stage were more subtle, more subconscious, and more difficult to judge with delicacy, than a mere procession or progress into the void.

I know it was commonly said, both in medieval times and modern times, that the pilgrimage had become a mockery, by which it seems to be meant merely that it had become a holiday. But it was because it had been a popular shrine that it became a popular holiday. That this involved all the revelry, buffoonery, drunkenness and incidental swinishness of all sorts that belonged and still belong to a popular holiday, we could learn easily enough from Chaucer's own description, if we had not already learned it from our own common sense and experience. But Chaucer himself is very careful to put first the solid fact that a great many people, at least, did really wish to render thanks to St. Thomas of Canterbury for help in their past sickness; a good proportion of his own pilgrims are certainly religious people acting from religious motives. The truth is that, in this matter, I am again haunted, I might almost say tormented, by that little query which I put in the first pages of this book; the query that runs, 'But what of to-day—and what of to-morrow?' If it was a scandal to have religion mixed with riot or profanity, has it been such a complete cure to have riot and profanity unmixed with religion? If it was superstition to venerate the bones of a great man killed by a tyrant, is it any more intelligent that millions of clerks should go down and merely gape at the Sea, without having even the sense to worship Neptune? Is it more dignified that bankers should give us a St. Lubbock's Day on which nobody thinks of St. Lubbock; not even to the point of adoring colossal images of ants and bees? Simon of Sudbury, Bishop of London, had denounced the popular profanation of the pilgrimage. The Wycliffite tradition, and afterwards the Puritan tradition, has treated him as a hero. He may have been a hero, but he was not a prophet. He did not know what was going to happen to popular religion, when it had lost the Canterbury Pilgrimage. The truth is that anybody who tries to look at Simon of Sudbury's problem from both sides, from front and behind, will realize its real difficulty; but will incline to a simple if slightly impatient conclusion. He will be tempted to say that human beings are not to be trusted with a religion. But are they therefore to be trusted the more without a religion?

Chaucer died and left his last great work unfinished; his most perfect achievement still imperfect. Though he lived a long and busy life, he, more than any other great writer, died young. He had only come to the beginning when he came to the end. He was already old when his work became suddenly and entirely new. There have been cases of men trying a new trick or experiment and breaking down in the middle of it, as did Dickens in the detective-story of Drood. But the experiment was a small one; which he might have made at any time, and one which many others had already made. There are cases of an author in his last days writing something rather separate and unique, like a last confession or farewell; as did Shakespeare with the unearthly loveliness of The Tempest; or, in another way, Ibsen in the rather incomprehensible outbreak of When We Dead Awaken. But these were things not to be developed or extended further, even by their authors, let alone by anybody else. For good or evil, they were not things that could be done twice. Nobody could write another play like The Tempest; nobody, I should imagine, wants to write a play like When We Dead Awaken. But The Canterbury Tales, the last unfinished work of Chaucer, is in quite another sense unfinished and finished. It is not only a new scheme, but a new style. It is not only a new style, but potentially a new school. It is as if he had been an architect, who through a long and successful life had planned out the round arches of the Romanesque and the squat pillars of the Norman churches, and then, almost on his death-bed, had dreamed of and designed the first Gothic cathedral. For indeed The Canterbury Tales do remain rather like a huge, hollow, unfinished Gothic cathedral with some of the niches empty and some filled with statues, and some part of the large plan traced only in lines upon the ground.

Just as in such a case, the arches would stand up more strongly than the statues, or the walls be made first and more firmly than the ornament, so in Chaucer's work the framework is finer than the stories which correspond to the statues. The prolonged comedy which we call the Prologue, though it includes many interludes and something like an epilogue, is made of much stronger material than the tales which it carries; the narrative is quite superior to the narratives. The Wife of Bath's Tale is not so good as the Wife of Bath; the Reeve's Tale is not so vivid as the Reeve; we are not so much interested in the Summoner's story as in the Summoner, and care less about Griselda than about the Clerk of Oxford. The Miller does not prove even his own rather brutal energy, by telling a broad and rather brutal story, half so well as the poet conveys it in those curt and strong lines about his breaking a door by butting it with his red-bristled head. And the whole conception and cult of Chivalry is no better set forth, in all the seventy pages that unfold 'The Knight's Tale,' than in the first few lines that describe the Knight.

It is impossible to say for certain, of course, whether Chaucer realized how much more real and original were the passages which concern the Pilgrims than those which concern their imaginary heroes or martyrs. It is possible that, like many another great original genius, he did not know which parts of his own work were really original, still less which were really great. It is likely enough that Shakespeare attached more importance to some laboured conceit, in the manner of the Euphuists, than to such stabs of staccato speech as 'Kill Claudio!' or 'Undo this button'. It may be that Chaucer really did regard the Prologue as a mere frame, in the sense of a picture-frame. In that case, we can only say he invented a new kind of picture-gallery, in which the picture-frames are much better than the pictures. Still, a word must be said for the understanding of the pictures, even when he had boldly stolen them out of other people's picture-frames. In other words, we must understand something about stories as stories, before we even open this medieval story-book.

I have taken too much notice, perhaps, of those who are still so childish as to talk about the childishness of Chaucer. I mean in the sense of bearing with him, as if he talked broken English. It would be truer to say he talked the unbroken English, which we have since broken up into bits and snippets of American slang or jaded journalese. There is rather more sense of a rounded whole, in expressing the religious sentiment in words like 'Almighty and almerciable Queen', than in saying, 'Up-to-date scientists admit worth-while qualities in religious urge'. I leave it to the most modern critic to decide which sounds like English and which like Pidgin English. I have pointed out that the poet was not in fact infantile or immature in any contemptible connotation of the words; but in many ways an experienced and even a polished person. He was an artist who picked perfect words to produce his exact effect; he was a diplomatist who was probably himself picked out for his power of picking his words tactfully and persuasively; he was a philosopher who drew theoretical distinctions, along the lines of contemporary thought, with almost the delicacy of a theologian; he was a well-read man, who could collect stories of all shapes and colours from the ends of the earth; whose fancy could follow the mazy mythology of Ovid, and whose intellectual imagination could measure the starry stature of Dante. But I confess that there is a real element which might rightly be called childishness, if the term be used in a healthier sense, for something that may or may not have grown up, but has not grown old. There is a quality in Chaucer, and in the whole civilization that produced Chaucer, which men of rather wearier civilizations must make a certain effort to understand. It is something that moderns have mainly praised in childhood; because moderns have not preserved it in manhood. It is gusto; it is zest; it is a certain appetite for things as they actually are, and because they actually are; for a stone because it is a stone, or a story because it is a story. If that is merely simplicity, he was simple. If that is merely stupidity, he was stupid. That is, if we would appreciate him or his age, we must go back to something that stirred in us when we first found that the door of a doll's-house would open; or when we first found that the end of a story could be the point of a story, as in the surprise that ends the admirable story of Puss in Boots. Chaucer and his friends were really capable of reacting to those surprises; of waiting patiently for the point of those stories; of treating the whole narrative process as a pleasure in itself. Most modern people cannot really do this; they have read too many novels. They have forgotten the very verbal meaning, by which novels once meant news. They have lost the positive pleasure in a double fashion; partly because they have been bewildered by too many plots; partly because they have been even more bewildered by the newer sort of novels, which have not got any plots.

Now when we talk of Chaucer, or for that matter of Shakespeare and many others, as borrowing plots, or copying plots, or repeating plots, we must always remember that the age was really simpler in the sense that there were fewer plots; and that a plot was a very precious thing. It was really prized, unlike many other precious things. It was prized because it had a point, and people were normal enough in their nervous system to start at the prick of the point; instead of having their dead minds punctured all over with old pricks, like the diseased arm of a drug-fiend. A mere anecdote was thought worthy of careful presentation, as a relic was worthy of a casket of jewels. The medieval man spent, or wasted, music and ornament and developed detail upon a pointed story; just as the more subtle modern novelist wastes them upon a pointless story. The point to seize is that the people involved were really so far simple, or (as I should say) so far receptive, as to regard a mere story as something rich and rare; something that was a gift; something that was a good in itself. Most of the Canterbury Tales, and especially the first and most finished of them, are good in themselves. I mean they are good even apart from the way in which this particular man of genius presented them. We may say, if we like, that Chaucer's stories are excellent, only they are not Chaucer's. But we must realize that Chaucer thought they were excellent, and enjoyed them as much as if he had invented them. We must not leave out the love of mere naked narrative in the men of medieval times. Every one knows, for instance, the outline of 'The Knight's Tale;' how two friends quarrelled for the same lady-love and were condemned to settle it by combat; how one knight prayed to Mars to give him the victory, but the other knight prayed to Venus to give him the lady. It is a good story; it would make a good play; if a play were still a thing with a plot. Everybody knows, I suppose, the plot of the Pardoner's Tale, which is a plot in the precise sense; of how three thieves went to find Death to slay him, and found only a heap of gold; and how one was sent to fetch food and wine, which he poisoned, while the others plotted to stab him and did so; so that they all found Death on their heap of gold. That is a good story, and contains a grim crescendo of dramatic action. This element of mere pleasure in narrative must be allowed for, in all accounts of the atmosphere of the age. For instance, the story of Griselda, as a moral story, must be balanced with a great mass of medieval jokes and satires about the woman ruling the roost, and the grey mare being the better horse. But the story of Griselda, as a story, is simply one of the numberless legends and fables about a person passing successfully through a series of tests or trials; like the weird tasks of Michael Scott or the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Men listen to it, as children would listen to it, merely to see how the person passed through his or her misfortunes to the end. If this sort of innocent intensity be called childishness, it is true that the age of Chaucer was childish. But we must recover something of the spirit in order to understand the age; we must sink back into that barbaric past, and far beyond it into dark depths of primitive instinct, and even endure to hear some cry out of prehistoric savagery commanding us to become like little children.

Nevertheless, there is another side; and an aspect in which the pictures are extremely picturesque. It is a commonplace of the critics that the actual stock of stories, which fill up the framework of The Canterbury Tales, is a borrowed stock from all sorts of sources, like the plots of the plays of Shakespeare. But the narrative poet had at least one opportunity of showing dramatic talent which was denied to the dramatist. Shakespeare did not have to offer each of his comedies as the creation of one of his characters. We only know that Hamlet liked a particular play about Hecuba and that Theseus could put up with a particular play about Pyramus and Thisbe. We are unilluminated touching the theatrical tastes of King Lear or Macbeth. But Chaucer had a collection of characters almost as diverse in dignity or indignity, and had to select a story for each. The stories are chosen with admirable art; with much more aptitude than some speeches in some dramas. Nothing could be more fitting than the sustained nobility of 'The Knight's Tale;' a tapestry of heroes clad in gold, except perhaps the ragged and rending contrast that tears it at the end, when the Monk is just about to begin his dignified recital of the deaths of kings, and the drunken Miller roars him down with his cataract of coarse, not to say foul narrative; an admirably managed collision of comedy; as if the ruffian had thrown a pail of slops over the statelier story-teller. But other examples, which are less well known, illustrate the same persistent neatness of impersonation. What could be more apt than making the dignified anti-clerical Doctor careful to narrate, not a Christian or even romantic story, but a story of the stoic virtue of heathen Rome; the story of Virginius, precisely the sort of hero whom such secularists have always preferred to the saint. How right it is that the chivalric romance of the young Squire should differ from that of the old Knight, in having a touch of the Arabian Nights about it; a more irresponsible and fabulous flight, upon a winged horse, into the golden horizons of Tartary. Equally delicate is the instinct which makes the Prioress, the refined and charming spinster, tell the beautiful legend of the child singing down the street on his way to the crown of martyrdom; or the Father Confessor of the nuns, a comfortable humorist of the type rather common as the male adviser of devout females, tell a sort of playful parable, full of nods and winks, in which the weaknesses of humanity are courteously covered by the feathered costume of cocks and hens. It is more generally recognized that the quarrel between the Summoner and the Friar is vigorously illustrated in their respective narratives, and the same sort of interplay of tales occurs in many places throughout the whole. Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of the Wife of Bath's Tale than the enormous and inordinate length of the Wife of Bath's Prologue. One is momentarily reminded of the proportions between one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays and one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's prefaces. Nobody will say that the Wife of Bath bears a marked resemblance to Mr. Shaw; for of all the Pilgrims she was possibly the least Puritan. But her glorious and garrulous egotism, her unfathomable and inexhaustible vitality, are quite admirably hit off in the mere fact that she talks about things in general at such interminable, if not intolerable length, long before she gets to the beginning of her story at all. Chaucer, with his typical shrewdness, has not supplied any such long personal preface to any of the other stories. There are, of course, any number of other minor examples of the same aptitude; indeed there are very few of the stories that are in themselves entirely impersonal, or could have been shifted to any other person. It is not for nothing that the comfortable and prosperous Merchant tells a tale that is rather naughty, in the manner of a French farce, but not gross in the manner of the Miller's Tale. I will not debate the case of the Cook's Tale, specially called 'Gamelyn', because I know its authenticity is very doubtful. Finally, there is the supreme example that I have already given, of the irony of the Rhyme of Sir Topas. I mean the fact that the poet's own story is the only unpoetical story. The tales are always appropriate; and the inappropriate is the most appropriate of all. Chaucer has distributed caps to fit the heads of the whole company; and when he reserves the dunce's cap for himself, it is all the more fitting because it does not fit.

If, then, we regard the stories in a dramatic light, as connected with the characters and quarrels of the storytellers, we can stretch our minds to take in a general conception of the work which Chaucer was doing, whether he knew he was doing it or not. The whole work takes on the character of a Novel, the first true Novel in history. In it the fundamental logic of most previous storytelling is already reversed. The story-tellers do not merely exist to tell the stories; the stories exist to tell us something about the story-tellers. The novel of character has appeared, and the novel of character is something rather different even from the epic, let alone the allegory or anecdote or story with a point. For though the great epic poets, Homer above all, have sometimes a very strong sense of character, still their ultimate motive is a true movement towards a crisis or an act; a turning-point of time illustrative of the fate of man or the will of God. Homer has made a real character of Hector, but the subject of the Iliad is not the character of Hector, or even the life of Hector; it is the death of Hector, and the death of Hector is the doom of Adam. It is quite different with that more modern form of art for art's sake, which may be called character for character's sake. We could not expect to have Hector talking for ever in his tent; as we should like to have Falstaff talking for ever in his tavern. One could not go wandering aimlessly with Orlando and Ruggiero as one could with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. There would have to be a Quest of some kind, that is, an ultimate epic action; the epic is always a chanson de geste. And in the same way, nobody perhaps would have been more surprised than Chaucer to be told that he had added or discovered something that is not to be found in Virgil. Yet it is true that we might be interested in a Knight who never got to Canterbury, as we could hardly be interested in a Trojan hero who never got to Rome. In the novel of character, characters are companions; and The Canterbury Tales is the grand original of all such works, because they appear in companionship.

Indeed I rather wonder nobody has tried to turn it into a novel. Many have made a paraphrase; including some cases in which it might rather be called parody. But, oddly enough, the experiment which would be the most frivolous seems to me the most fascinating; and I am rather surprised that it has never been tried. There have been renderings of the medieval poet into modern verse, and renderings into a sort of medieval prose. There have also been renderings into a more or less modern prose. But I have never seen what I may call a rendering into modern fiction. I wonder that somebody, especially among the novelists, has not tried his hand, merely as an experiment or a joke, at turning the Prologue and framework of The Canterbury Tales into the form of a modern novel. The thing might be done, of course, in very different degrees of seriousness or silliness or pure satire. It would be quite unhistorical to turn the medieval crowd into a modern crowd; for in a thousand things all the characters are really medieval. But, like many anachronisms, it would be a great joke. It would be amusing to see how far we could really get along with the Host as a modern hotel-proprietor, the Knight as a retired Colonel knighted for his military services, the Clerk of Oxford as an Oxford don, the Franklin as an ordinary country gentleman with a good estate, the Doctor as a modern doctor, the Parson as a modern parson, and so on. It would be historically illuminating to see what could be done; still more historically illuminating to note what could not be done. For the moment, however, I do not mention this imaginary modern novel with any wild intention of attempting to write it. I mention it as the shortest and sharpest way of conveying, to the modern reader, what seems to me the amazing genius of Geoffrey Chaucer as a novelist.

It is not a question of the broad comedy or farce which is most commonly mentioned by the critics, as in the unedifying quarrels of the Summoner or the Miller. It is a thread of thoroughly sound and thoughtful psychology that runs through almost all the interchanges, rather especially in the passages that are comparatively quiet. I will take only one example to illustrate what I mean. It is an example that I have never seen noticed, though doubtless some of the very able Chaucerian students have noticed it. But I rather fancy most people have not noticed it, because it is not anything in the way of an insult, but is rather a compliment. Only it is exactly the compliment that would be paid by that particular sort of person, to the other particular sort of person, at that particular time and place. I mean the passage in which the Franklin, the hoary but hearty old squire, with the big appetite and the beaming geniality, listens to the tale told by the other or medieval sort of Squire, the young gallant who is the son and attendant of the Knight. This young gentleman has pleasing manners, and I suspect a certain modest self-complacency, but he has been taught to treat his elders with respect, and to mingle such courtesy with his natural high spirits. He tells a tale which is of the nature of a fairy-tale, as compared with many of the others; a fine fantastic fable about a king who had a magic ring and a magic horse; there is nothing else notable about it, except that he evidently tells it with fluency and gusto and makes himself, more or less consciously, rather a fine figure in the company. At the end of his story comes one of those minor humours which reveal the real novelist's grip on human nature. The old Franklin, who has been listening, I imagine, with a slightly gaping gravity, impressed by the continuity rather than the content or precise meaning of the monologue, seems to shake himself, assumes an air of massive and venerable solemnity, and ponderously compliments the young man on having said his little piece. He informs the youth (if we may so translate him) that he is a credit to his family and upbringing; that he has performed his duties in an eminently satisfactory manner, and generally that he is almost a model to his generation. Then the thought behind all this begins to shape itself, and the old gentleman introduces the lamentable subject of his own son, who is (it would seem) a most prodigal and unprofitable social character; quite unlikely to go out of his way to entertain the company by telling, or even leaving half-told, the story of Cambuscan bold. The rest of the old squire's speech consists entirely of regrets and gloomy prophecies about his own absent and unpresentable offspring. Now that is a living incident that leaps at the eye; a story that comes straight out of the things that really happen. It is as quiet and as real as Jane Austen. It has only to be translated into the language of a modern novel, and it would be as vivid even to the modern novel-reader. He would instantly see the poor old gentleman shaking his head and saying (entirely irrelevantly, because some other young man had just finished a recitation), 'Ah, I only wish my boy could be made to understand, &c., &c.' It reminds one of that situation which Stevenson truly said would make an excellent comedy; in which two grumbling old fathers had each a sort of half-jealous, half-argumentative, admiration for the son of the other.

Now there are any number of little lively scenes like that, in the intercourse of the characters in The Canterbury Tales. They are filled with that truth that is especially the truth of fiction. I mean that Chaucer knew exactly what sort of person he meant by the Franklin and exactly what sort of person he meant by the Squire; and therefore knew exactly what they would say to each other, even in a contingency that he had not yet especially considered. The characters have been already built up by innumerable small touches, and, improbable as it may sound in such a connexion, nearly all the seemingly accidental touches are actually used, or do actually tell, in the full development of the comedy. There would not be that particular touch of comic pathos, about the poor old Franklin's disapproval of his son, if the Franklin himself had been primarily a moralist or a model of austerity and abnegation. The fact that we know the old man to be himself rather a jolly old heathen, enormously fond of food and drink, gives him somehow all the human helplessness of a very normal father. Similarly, it was not for nothing that we were told of the young Squire, long before he began to tell the Squire's Tale, that, with all his gaiety, he was meek and serviceable, and carved before his father at the table. It was exactly that touch of deference in the young dandy, that probably produced the vague but vastly favourable impression which moved the Franklin to speech. We can imagine the young man anywhere, even in a modern novel. He would be the sort of young man from Oxford, who is very careful to address an older man as 'Sir'.

And all this was done when the world had never so much as dreamed of a novel, in the modern sense of a mere study of the fine shades of fictitious character. This was done in an age of rigid religious allegories, of flat and decorative romances of chivalry, of stories having indeed a hundred merits of harmonious pattern or verbal melody, of spiritual idealism or intellectual symbolism; but hardly as yet even the beginnings of what we now call the psychological element in narrative. Chaucer did it alone; he did it almost by accident; he did it by sheer moral imagination, in a style of which there were as yet no models to emulate and no rules even to break. It was like the first portrait drawn in a world that had known nothing but patterns. Beautiful patterns indeed, and ingenious and intellectual patterns, and patterns showing a profound knowledge of mathematics and their relation to metaphysics; but with never a line or a curve in them calculated to teach anybody how to begin the particular picture of a face. It may be said that this is too sweeping a description of the world of literature to which Chaucer had access, and so in a sense it is; but it will be found, I think, that the exceptions really prove the rule. Dante, for instance, most certainly had a profound sense of a human character, in the deeper sense of a human soul. I think it probable that it was this sense of individuality in Dante that so profoundly attracted Chaucer; and made Chaucer, with an insight remarkable at the time, prefer the bitter exile of Ravenna to the resplendent Laureate of Rome. But even the case of Dante does not meet the particular point I mean. The reason is not merely that Dante could not, by the very nature of his work and plan, develop the delicate and light comedy in consideration here. Nobody would expect to find the joke about the Franklin and the Squire cheerfully introduced into the Circle of Ice or mentioned in passing by St. Bernard when discoursing on the Beatific Vision. But the reason is deeper than that. It is the reason given, with great insight and wisdom, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, when he said that tragedy swamps character while comedy consists in character. Dante deals with those huge and heroic passions which are simply human or superhuman; but in any case overwhelm the small differentiations that make all the fun of comic fiction. The Franklin is essentially one particular father grumbling over one particular son, in one particular set of highly amusing social circumstances. But the cry of the father in Dante, as it comes out of the Tower of Hunger, is simply the cry of fatherhood. I am not claiming for Chaucer the very highest power of tragic or typical expression, which is not so much the voice of men as of man. But I do claim for him that his comedy of character was of the finest; but above all, that it was the first.

Nevertheless, if we are to understand the medieval world, but still more if we are to understand the modern world, we must recur to the real limit or term set to the long-drawn-out comedy of the Canterbury Pilgrims; the limit which is Canterbury. It is true, as I have said, that this original and astonishing adventure in literature does bring in all that we value most of the fiction of the present; but it also brings us to a certain blank or doubt about the fiction of the future. The Novel was a speciality of the nineteenth century; precisely because it did seem, in the lull of the liberal enlightenment, possible to study mere individuality or idiosyncrasy; and to study it in a world of eternal leisure. It was not for nothing that the three-volume novel was found in the seaside library. There was a sort of suggestion of an endless holiday, in that study of character for character's sake. I do not mean that it was not, or is not, or will not always be, a normal and even noble intellectual interest. I mean that the age of the great novelists took the holiday for granted: assumed that the basis of the human brotherhood could never be broken up. The real trouble is this; that after a certain point of intellectual differentiation, the brotherhood is broken up. In a revolution, men will not stand still to be studied. In a fundamental philosophical disagreement, men will not even agree about what is worth studying. This modern division is masked by the mildness of modern manners. The Conservative clerk and the Socialist clerk do not bawl and bellow at each other as did the Miller and the Reeve; but they disagree with each other much more than did the Miller and the Reeve. And when the Socialist actually acts as the Communist, even the mildness has been known to be modified. It is also masked by a modern mysticism, which leads many to feel quite honestly that they can do without the definite goal of the journey. But while this may mean for some a growth of sympathy, it means for most a break-up of sympathies. There is nothing to keep the Pilgrims on the same Pilgrimage.

The truth is that the broad religion creates the narrow clique. It is what is called the religion of dogmas, that is of facts (or alleged facts), that creates a broader brotherhood and brings men of all kinds together. This is called a paradox; but it will be obvious to anyone who considers the nature of a fact. All men share in a fact, if they believe it to be a fact. Only a few men commonly share a feeling, when it is only a feeling. If there is a deep and delicate and intangible feeling, detached from all statements, but reaching to a wordless worship of beauty, wafted in a sweet savour from the woods of Kent or the spires of Canterbury, then we may be tolerably certain that the Miller will not have it. The Miller can only become the Pilgrim, if he recognizes that God is in the heavens as he recognizes that the sun is in the sky. If he does recognize it, he can share the dogma just as he can share the daylight. But he cannot be expected to share all the shades of fine intellectual mysticism that might exist in the mind of the Prioress or the Parson. I can understand that argument being turned in an anti-democratic as well as an anti-dogmatic direction; but anyhow the individualistic mystics must either do without the mysticism or do without the Miller. To some refined persons the loss of the latter would be no very insupportable laceration of the feelings. But I am not a refined person and I am not merely thinking about feelings. I am even so antiquated as to be thinking about rights; about the rights of men, which are extended even to millers. Among those rights is a certain rough working respect and consideration, which is at the basis of comradeship. And I say that if the comradeship is to include the Miller at all, it must be based on the recognition of something as really true, and not merely as ideally beautiful. It is easy to imagine the Knight and the Prioress riding to Canterbury and talking in the most elegant and cultivated strain, exchanging graceful fictions about knights and ladies for equally graceful legends about virgins and saints. But that sort of sympathy, especially when it reaches the point of subtlety, is not a way of uniting, or even collecting, all the Canterbury Pilgrims. The Knight and the Prioress would be the founders of a clique; as they probably were already the representatives of a class. I am not concerned here with whether the modern mind prefers its pretensions to popular breadth or its claims to creedless spirituality. I am only pointing out that it cannot have both at once; that if religion is an intuition, it must be an individual intuition and not a social institution; and that it is much easier to build a social institution on something that is regarded as a solid fact. Now, however strange it may seem, the men of the Middle Ages did regard the miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and the help given them from heaven by his intercession 'when that they were sick', as examples of a solid fact. There was any amount of human historical evidence for such miracles; and they were too ignorant and primitive to have learnt to prefer determinist theory to historical evidence. And as all men desire health, and as even the worst men may ask heaven for help in ill-health, and as few except the very worst would refuse altogether to be thankful for being healthy, the whole purpose and attitude of the Pilgrimage rested on a reality recognized by all sorts of people, good, bad and indifferent. A religion of miracles turned all this crowd of incongruous people into one company. A religion of moods would never have brought them together at the tavern, far less sent them trotting laboriously to the tomb.

That is perhaps the deepest difference between medieval and modern life, and the difference is so great that many never imagine it, because it is impossible to describe it. We may even say that the modern world is more religious, in that the religious are more religious. Anyhow, there is nothing to prevent a modern mystic being as mystical as St. John of the Cross; and doubtless many students of St. John of the Cross are even now approaching his sanctity. But we may be practically certain that if there is a modern man like the Miller or the Reeve, he has not got any religion at all. He certainly would not go on a religious pilgrimage, or perform any religious duty at all. One of the quarrels in The Canterbury Tales sounds exactly like a quarrel in a public-house to-day, between a boisterous bookie and a surly north-country groom. It is still possible to find two such persons in a public-house; it might be possible to find them in a public conveyance going down to the Derby. But how are we to stretch our minds so as to imagine the bookie and the groom deliberately going together to Glastonbury, solely to inquire into the recent psychic phenomena supposed (by some) to be connected with the Holy Grail? That is the measure of the difference between Chaucer's age and our own. That is the measure of the difference between an objective religion, worshipped as an object by the whole people, and a subjective religion, studied as a subject only by the religious. There is something much more dramatic and challenging than the disagreement of the Summoner and the Friar: and that is the agreement of the Summoner and the Friar. They would never even have come together to quarrel, except in a social system that fundamentally assumed them to agree.

Thus, the Canterbury Pilgrimage takes on a very symbolic social character, and is indeed the progress which emerged out of the medieval into the modern world. All modern critics can take pleasure in the almost modern realism of the portraiture; in the variety of the types and the vigour of the quarrels. But the modern problem is more and more the problem of keeping the company together at all; and the company was kept together because it was going to Canterbury. It will be another business, if the variety of companions discovers a variety of aims. It will raise a new problem if the Miller, with his appetite for more vulgar noises, refuses after all to go to Canterbury and insists on going off to Ramsgate; possibly the scene of sports in which he bore away the Ram. It will be a different thing, if the Merchant firmly refuses to ride beyond Chatham, because all his interests are limited to the progressive industry of that wealthy and dirty town. Darker days will come, when the Prioress, not content with pitying mice, will withdraw to a Vegetarian Hostel on the hills of Westerham, inhabited by cranks; while the now aged Knight, swearing that the Service is going to the dogs, and that these damned pacifists haven't a damned patriotic instinct left, shall devote himself furiously to the fortifications of Dover. As their counterparts stand to-day, it is easier to imagine the Wife of Bath wanting to go sunbathing at Margate, or the Clerk instantly returning, with refined disgust, to Oxford, than to imagine either of them wanting to toil on together to a particular tomb in Canterbury. For the moment, this division of heart is masked by a certain heartiness, in the modern pursuit of mere games and pleasures; but you cannot make a complete social system out of games and pleasures. You cannot, in some dark hour of peril, ask thousands to die for the Derby, or even to be taxed to death for the International Golf Championship. A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for very long. Moreover, the amusements are at least as narrow as the devotions and dedications. You will not persuade the Clerk of Oxford to go to Ramsgate, merely to see the Miller win the Ram. You will not persuade the Miller to go to Oxford, which might well have been named, at that time, after the Dumb Ox of Philosophy: St. Thomas of Aquin. But they were both ready to go together to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The real modern problem is—what pilgrimage have we on which these two different men will ride together? I mean, of course, one on which they will ride together and remain different. There are many forces making for a superficial sameness in modern life; far too many. There is standardization and the stunts of journalism and the various forms of conscription and coercion rather peculiar to our time; such as Prohibition. But you do not re-consecrate the Cathedral by shutting up the Tabard; or make men want to go on a pilgrimage by forbidding them to go to a public-house. There are many modern forces, commercial or scientific, tending to make men look or talk the same. But the Clerk and the Miller did not look and talk the same. They had nothing in common but their purpose; but they had a purpose. It is very puzzling to look at the real society around us at this moment, and consider whether it has a purpose. For the present, at least, there is no Canterbury in sight for the Canterbury Pilgrims. The coloured cavalcade is halted somewhere in the suburbs, and suffering the bewilderment dating from that day, when sectarians and journalists and jerry-builders between them decided that every man should live in the same villa and every man in a different universe.

Some of these conclusions are inevitably coloured with my own convictions; but I do not think that those most opposed to them will differ greatly about the contemporary facts. Few will deny that a certain kind of straightforward story, with a plot and a point, but adorned with vivid portraits of different persons, began to enter the world in Chaucer's time. Not many will deny that the development of that straightforward story is doubtful and perplexed in our own time. It is possible, of course, that somebody will make something out of it; something that is another story; something that is not a story. Something may be done with the subconsciousness of the Miller or the dual personality of the Wife of Bath. But I doubt whether it will be what we have known as a readable romance, if it cannot hold together the Wife of Bath as one person or the Canterbury Pilgrimage as one party. I am not alone in thinking that we are likely to see the break-up of the particular culture made by the Renaissance, at least as much as Chaucer was in a position to see the break-up of the particular culture of the Middle Ages. Nor am I alone, I fancy, in suspecting that this special creation called the modern Novel, which began with him, may end with us.

At least, in this lighter and (dare I say) lesser matter of letters, may we who are burdened with conclusions, or even convictions, be suffered to entertain a suspicion? A suspicion that in the secret matter of happiness (not prosperity, or efficiency, or even equality, but happiness) men do not merely progress indefinitely, but rather pass a flashing moment of maturity; pass it, for instance, when they drink just too much good wine at the Tabard and fall under the table, or progress beyond Canterbury and fall into the sea. That there is an instant of radiant ripeness which the drunkard does not recover, and to which neither does the dead return; and that this crisis of perfection, in literature and the love of literature, comes when what is old and simple can still mingle with what is new and strange. When men can still listen to a story like children, but can already savour the humours of men like men; when men can still be surprised at the logical turn of fate that swings round and strikes down the victorious Arcite, but can already be ironically entertained by the torrent of self-expression from the Wife of Bath, who exults in sheer egotism for pages before she gets to any story at all; when they were still so unsophisticated as to be moved by the mountainous yet ever mounting crescendo of magnanimity in the generous rivalries of the Franklin's Tale; and yet have gained enough of culture to appreciate some verbal felicities in the telling, as in the Dantesque touch of the woman's wild prayer that all the high black rocks be sunken into hell; when a man could yet weep like the Host (that sentimentalist!) over the mere death of a simple maid, and yet roar down a bore or a bully with the joyful contempt of Rabelais; when they could find a melodious pleasure in the mere flow of a narrative and yet remain sufficiently wide-awake to react when it ended with the point of an anecdote; when the world was young enough to be capable of hero-worship and old enough to be capable of humour; and that this flame of the highest happiness flashed for a moment in the mirror of the genius of Chaucer; like the noonday sun upon a naked sword.