VI. Chaucer as an Englishman

We have heard much of late of something called Emergent Evolution; a phrase which, like many scientific phrases, we may find rather useful so long as we do not use it scientifically. Evolution as explanation, as an ultimate philosophy of the cause of living things, is still faced with the problem of producing rabbits out of an empty hat; a process commonly involving some hint of Design. But evolution, and especially emergence, as a convenient and compact description of a sort of relative growth we can all see for ourselves, is very useful in many connexions, and especially in connexion with the problem of England in the later Middle Ages. The Englishman, as a national figure now fully nationalized, stands in the modern world for certain associations or impressions, true or false, but anyhow fairly familiar. We could hardly say simply that, in Chaucer's time, the Englishman was non-existent. We cannot exactly say that the Englishman was existent. We can say that the Englishman was emergent. But it is necessary to state more exactly the stage of his emergence, and the true proportions in which he was like and unlike ourselves.

The nineteenth-century version of the Englishman would be entirely false in the fourteenth century. It may be urged in answer (by curious and restless minds) that the nineteenth-century version was entirely false in the nineteenth century. It is easy enough to point out contrasts and inconsistencies that might seem to make the whole ordinary English legend a lie. The normal Englishman was supposed to be a sturdy and stoical figure, who hated to show his feelings for fear of seeming flashy; or making anything so theatrical as 'a scene'. And his most popular novelist was Dickens and his most fashionable statesman was Disraeli. But though it is obvious that he was much more romantic than he thought he was, it is true that his romance about himself was the romance of being unromantic. That is, it was the romance of being practical; even the romance of being prosaic. There was a multitudinous English type made on that model, and they really were more national as well as more normal than the quacks or geniuses whom they admired. It is obvious that the 'unpatriotic' Cobden was a hundred times more of an Englishman than the patriotic Lord Beaconsfield; and perhaps the humdrum Trollope more representative than the dazzling Dickens. When all allowances are made, it is true that a type had appeared, by about the end of the eighteenth century, which was commonly regarded as the English type and is even now only partially transformed; a type compared with which most foreigners appeared volatile or violent or exuberantly vivacious. Its story had been one of two or three centuries. Its foundation, like every foundation, was religious: its first basis had been Puritanism; on this was erected all the ugly opulence of Industrialism; and then there had matured another influence, most modern but perhaps most fascinating and fashionable of all; what may be called the genteel stoicism of the Public Schools. The gentlemen who governed England, the gentlemen who were England, received their two great commandments. They must play the game and they must not play at it. Above all, they must not play at it playfully. A singular seriousness must be directed towards the sports that most other people think merely sportive; and they must be made the rites of a religion of patriotism. With this went all the kindred things: the pride in evading emotion; the contented confession of a certain ignorance of music or foreign refinements; the hazy identification of the vices of industrialism with the virtue of industry. This Englishman did exist; at any rate he did try to exist. And there is a sense in which the ideal is more important than the real. The real is only useful to realistic novelists. It is the ideal, or in a better language the god, who really leads the masses of men and turns the corners of history.

When we have firmly and clearly modelled the image of what the whole modern world has meant by an Englishman, we must instantly and utterly destroy it. When we have once vividly understood what was really meant by the national ideal in the nineteenth century, we must utterly sweep it away from the whole field of the fourteenth century. Nothing whatever resembling that conscious ideal of common sense, or cold virility, existed for Chaucer and his contemporary countrymen. Indeed, so far as there was a general atmosphere and attitude, it was all the other way. If the Victorians could have actually had a vision of Chaucerian England, they would have thought the Englishman was a Frenchman. All the jokes against the Frenchman would be jokes against the fourteenth-century Englishman. All the emotions and expressions of emotions were there, especially those considered most un-English. If Jules and Jacques kissed each other, it would seem altogether absurd to Thackeray. If Palamon and Arcite kissed each other, it would not seem in the least absurd to Chaucer. That men should on occasion weep, and even weep in public, seemed no more unnatural to the writers of the older England than it did to the writers of the Old Testament or the Iliad. But the contrast is even plainer in the gesture of joy than the gesture of grief. The tag about Merry England is not unhistorical; for many historic witnesses did regard it as rather merrier than the neighbouring nations. The Victorian Englishman was rather prone to regard a damned fiddler as a damned foreigner. The medieval visitor to England described it as full of fiddling; as especially addicted to music and minstrelsy and dance and song. From the Victorian point of view, in so far as England did differ from France, it was in being rather more French than France. And indeed the Victorian, or the man who finds virtue only in the modern Public School ideal, must frankly face the fact that in the fourteenth century what he has called England did not exist. Not only was there another nation, but it was in a sense a Franco-English nation. It was partly because France and England were so nearly one nation, that the kings struggled so long to make them one kingdom. Anybody can see in history how near were the national types to each other then, and how far apart they are now. The Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin understood each other much better, as enemies, than French and Foch could understand each other as allies. Behind all was the great unity of Christendom, more than twelve hundred years old, which the later insular Englishman had never even heard of. Such was the condition when the first cracks appeared in that Continent. France and England did not unite; and the great English nation was founded, very largely by Joan of Arc.

Now it is when we have frankly and fully realized this that the fun begins. It is when we have cleared our minds of the last lingering notion that the proverbial practical Englishman existed then, as he exists now, that we can begin to consider what is meant by saying that he was not existent; but he was emergent. Geoffrey Chaucer no more regarded himself as John Bull than a prehistoric Red Indian regarded himself as a Regular Guy. He no more prided himself on being a plain blunt Englishman, with a Bible under one arm and a business ledger under the other, than a Cossack of the twelfth century prided himself on being a Communist of the twentieth. It was an utterly different world, the old world of Christendom which had once been the Christian Roman Empire; a world in which the local loyalties were still feudal; the larger loyalties still often imperial; and the ultimate loyalty entirely religious and long centred in Rome. Nine-tenths of the mind of a man like Chaucer were busy with things that have entirely vanished from the world, as seen by an English patriot to-day. The vast, if shadowy, suzerainty of the Emperor that had reared itself against the supremacy of the Pope; the assumption at the back of every Christian mind that the Crusades ought really to be continued, though they had already been practically abandoned; the serious juridical argument about the Plantagenet claim to the French throne; the vast and crowded ways of medieval travel, which followed so largely the great roads to the great shrines of the Continent. It can all be summed up by saying that Chaucer would have thought it quite as natural to go on a pilgrimage to Compostella as on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is also worth remarking that, if he had gone on a pilgrimage to Compostella, or to any Christian shrine in Hungary or Poland or the other end of Europe, he would very probably have seen a statue of St. Thomas of Canterbury looking down on him in a strange land.

But the point is this; that while nine-tenths of his mind made him a citizen of the old empire of Christendom, there was another tenth of his mind; and it was beginning to tell. Canterbury would not suggest to him anything resembling what we mean now by a cathedral city or an Archbishop of Canterbury. It would be more likely to suggest the Pope who had avenged St. Thomas on the tyrant who had him slain. But he was beginning to feel, with a part of his mind, that Canterbury was Canterbury and not Compostella: that it had a Kentish and not a Spanish smell about it; that, while it was an international shrine, it was a point of pride to have an international shrine inside one's own nation; and that, while it was only one of the holy places, it was convenient and comfortable to have a holy place so near home. We may say, if we like, that his subconsciousness was more national than his consciousness; I suspect that it was as yet only a corner of his subconsciousness; but it was growing; it was evolving; it was emergent. And it is really a subtle and fascinating study, far more fascinating than anything offered by a cheap simplification, modernization or nationalization of the Chaucerian phase, to trace out the first faint beginnings of the separate national character that exists to-day; the real roots of the difference that afterwards, in its later exaggeration, divided England from Europe.

There are several very curious, and even mysterious, things about Chaucer, which do already mark him out as a man somewhat different from the same sort of man in the France or Italy of his day. There are moments when we can truly say that the medieval Englishman is already beginning to be the modern Englishman. Something, often something oddly negative (as is often the case with the quaint qualities of the English), has begun to appear, in such a way that we can say now, though it is doubtful if we could have said then, 'This man is beginning to look devilish like an English Gentleman', or, 'If he does not look out, this will end in being a Good Sport'. Not that I would imply any lack of sympathy with these modern ideals, in moderation; I merely mean that, in this time of transition in which Chaucer lived, we sometimes suddenly see them looming far ahead; things not perhaps inevitable, but certainly unmistakable. These possibilities already existed; they need not eventually have been so much exaggerated; above all, they need not have been so much isolated. Anyhow, Chaucer could already boast of being distinguished from his fellow-Christians; though he could not yet boast of being divided from them.

I will take first one very strange example; the position of the poet in relation to fame and fashion. He was not an unsuccessful man. For the greater part of his life he was a successful man and a poet; and yet we cannot say exactly that he was a successful poet. That is, he was not successful as a poet in the way in which some of his contemporaries were successful as poets: praised and applauded as poets; crowned and enthroned as poets. In this respect there is a curious parallel between the mystery of Chaucer and the mystery of Shakespeare. They were neither of them failures or outcasts; they both seem to have had a good deal of solid success, though Shakespeare was wealthiest in later life and Chaucer in middle life. But they were more successful than famous; and more famous than glorious. The odd obscurity of Shakespeare, in some aspects, which has been the negative opportunity of so many cranks and quacks, is a real fact so far as it goes; and it can best be measured if we compare it, for instance, with the flamboyant fame of Ronsard a few years before in France. Some say that Shakespeare's death was disreputable; it is a far more creepy and uncanny fact that his life was respectable. He lived and died, not like a first-rate failure, but like a fourth-rate success. He lived and died a proper provincial burgess, a few years after Ronsard had gathered round his gorgeous death-bed that great assembly of nobles and princes in the robes of religion, and proclaimed to all Europe as with a trumpet that no man born had known so much glory as he, and that he was weary of it and thirsty for the glory of God. The obscure death of Shakespeare is almost as startling a contrast, whether it was disreputable or respectable.

Now Chaucer moves in almost exactly the same manner, on what may be called a lower level of moderate success. As we can compare the respectability of Shakespeare with the public glory of Ronsard, so we can compare the respectability of Chaucer with the towering splendour of Petrarch. Petrarch was not, I fancy, a much greater poet than Chaucer; certainly not so original a poet as Chaucer. Petrarch had a public triumph like the triumph of Julius Caesar; like the triumph of an Emperor who had conquered the world. He passed through the streets of Rome with an army of banners and trumpets, to where he was crowned with laurel, the eternal crown, upon the high rock of the Capitol, and went to Mass like a king in state, to leave his wreath on the altar of St. Peter's. And all this time we find the English poet, greater or at least as great, moving about busily, but entirely lost in the crowd; noticed by nobody in particular except the few people who sent him on his rather mysterious errands; apparently having a good deal to do, but always of the sort that rather involved his avoiding observation than obtaining fame. He seems to be all over the place; but he is always under the surface. Nobody says, 'I met old Chaucer in Westminster'; nobody writes, 'I had the honour to meet no less a person than Mr. Chaucer when I was in Italy'. He was in Italy when the radiant and resplendent Petrarch was there; certainly in the same country, probably in the same town. It is highly probable, though by no means certain, that they met. The question has been debated down to the last detail by men much more learned than I. But a much more important point, as I should consider it, is this: that in any case people would have said that Chaucer had managed to meet Petrarch; not that Petrarch had managed to meet Chaucer.

Now we may easily note this, to begin with, with the somewhat melancholy moral, 'That is about as much as England will do for literature and literary men'. Probably it was true then, as it is certainly true now, that France and Italy would lend themselves more naturally to a great popular enthusiasm for a poet as such; to a great national and even political pageant in honour of pure Beauty. It is also true that they have preserved, perhaps by their more direct hold on pagan antiquity, more of the ancient idea of an officium or official status of the Bard or the Orator; a sort of sacred position like that of the Priest or the Sibyl. Compared with that, we may say that in England all authors are amateurs. Many of them were primarily what used to be called humorists; that is, many of them were characters and some of them pretty queer characters. Even as early as Chaucer's time, it would seem, there was something of this aversion to the public carnival for the crowning of a poor literary gent. But, unless I am mistaken, there was something else in it, much more deep and subtle. Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer, with his unobtrusive way of going off on Government business, his taste for being trustworthy and not conspicuous, his carrying of important dispatches and trying to look like anybody else, has something extraordinarily English about him. We almost feel that he has given 'his man' a holiday and quietly packed his suit-case at the club. Already, in the fourteenth century, there is faintly foreshadowed that indescribable tone of the English gentleman on such a job. He is the unofficial official. He has the official obscurity of numberless gentlemen in Government offices. He has even a touch of the strong silent hero, who goes on Secret Service in the novels of Sapper and Le Queux. All this, of course, is a wild exaggeration like the novels in question; for, as I have said, the thing had only just faintly begun to be a tendency and had not yet ended in a type. Still, we cannot dismiss a dim impression of that sort of gentlemanly understanding, of that sort of impersonal personal mission, when we compare the sort of success that was allowed to Chaucer with the sort of success that was allowed to Petrarch. We have, perhaps, a hint of the sort of man who really, in his heart, thinks it more important to share a secret with his country's rulers than to be acclaimed like a god by all the crowds of his countrymen. Anyhow, it seems to me that there is already a subtly national note in this odd use of a man of genius; and this concentration on public affairs as private affairs. Chaucer was not in the least like a modern Englishman; but he was the beginning of something of which the modern Englishman was the end. The point here is that it had already begun.

Second, there is something symbolic in his social rank. There is even something symbolic in the doubts about his social rank. Something was already growing, and was especially developed in England, which was not quite explained by the logical system of ranks and guilds in the Middle Ages. For logic (or what reasonable people call reason) was almost the very soul of the Middle Ages. Yet something more indeterminate is already detaching itself; and in England it has become most detached. It is symbolized, as I say, in the very fact that one aspect or tradition of Chaucer shows him as the child of a common vintner selling barrels of wine to ruffians like the Shipman; while another shows him not so much a courtier as almost a cousin of some great prince like John of Gaunt. Something individualistic in English development made this really true of individuals, though not of classes. It must not be confused with that lifting of men from the lowest to the highest estate, which was a common action of medieval monarchy, as of all genuine monarchy. King Henry could raise the butcher's son as King Cophetua could raise the beggar-maid; that true personal authority often had a touch that seemed like magic. The thing I mean concerned the way in which the upper middle class abutted upon the upper class; and how particular people could cross the line in a particular way, especially in this particular country. Nor must it be confused with that opportunity often offered to the poorest to rise by the ladder of learning, and the assistance of the Church, which was the peculiar glory of the Middle Ages. This matter I mention now is more of a social accident; it would always be rather a chance for the richest than for the poorest; but they probably had more of a chance here than elsewhere. One way of putting it would be to say that the system of nobility was no longer mere nepotism; but it was still mere favouritism. Another way of putting it would be to say that the vintner's son, in the words of the comic opera, was appointed by a job; and a good job too.

Our England has been an aristocracy which denied that it was aristocratic. In this queer inverted pride there has often been hypocrisy, but often only inconsistency; the desire to combine limited privileges with liberal sentiments. Anyhow, its story for the last century or two has been that of a governing class which pretended not to govern. Now nothing of that last phase was possible to the philosophy of the Middle Ages. Princes they knew and citizens they knew, and the authority of superiors and the equality of brethren; but accepting social superiority as an atmosphere, while not asserting it as an institution, would have seemed to them mere nonsense. A medieval man would have thought it simply a mad paradox for anybody to give a man a coronet and a coat of arms to make him admirable, and then call people snobs for admiring him. When they crowned a man king, they made him king; and would have thought it silly to crown him, if he were only what we now call a constitutional king. Sometimes they preferred a republic; occasionally it degenerated into an aristocratic republic. But they did not explain that aristocracy is more democratic than democracy. All this singular way of talking is entirely modern, and we must not look for anything like that in the social position of Chaucer. Nevertheless, there is already something distinctively English in the social position. There is something private and occasional in his way of slipping into the social class above his own. We can almost hear the County, or the Club, saying that after all he is a damned good fellow; not without the implication of a damned useful fellow. But the point of the admission was, as it continued to be at least until very lately, that the exception was exceptional. It was exceptional even if it became pretty frequent or general. It was exceptional because it was personal. The word went forth that the vintner should be accepted; not that the vintners should be. So, until lately, the whole object of English aristocratic diplomacy was to admit the greengrocer without admitting the greengrocers; to admit the pork-butcher without admitting the pork-butchers; and especially of late, to admit the pawnbroker and the moneylender on the same principles and in even larger numbers. With the last phase of all (which has begun to happen in our time), in which the gentleman no longer patronizes the pawnbroker, because the pawnbroker patronizes the gentleman, we are not here concerned.

Thus, though the social status of the poet was only a sort of far-off signal, that might hint to historians that a long historical process had begun, there is something satisfactory and almost soothing in its embodiment in so great and so magnanimous a man. For it is not fair to forget the good side of this curious opportunist aristocracy adopted by the English. It has certainly proved the only human and workable way of preserving aristocracy, which has really not been preserved at all, as a method of government, by anybody except the English. Everywhere where aristocracy was logical, that is, where nobility and heredity and heraldry went together in a consistent scheme, that nobility has ceased to govern the nation. It has always been elbowed aside either by democracy or by despotism. The working of the English method does really require a certain kind of geniality and good humour; a certain spirit which, if we wish to see it at its very best, we could hardly find more vividly embodied than in the personal character of Chaucer.

I do not think it fanciful to find in Chaucer's work, not only the first faint outline of the English Gentleman, but also the first faint outline of the English Lady. There is no doubt that the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales is a Lady; but she seems to me to be an exceedingly English Lady. The considerable social importance of her little dogs would alone strike the special note. She was a spinster with exactly the right amount of sentiment; as exhibited in the motto on her brooch or clasp. She was particular about manners at table. She did not like to see a mouse caught in a trap. And indeed we may once more indulge our fancy, in finding one of these ancestral adumbrations; the suggestion of the whole temperamental tendency expressed in the special kind of kindness to animals so much valued by the English gentry to-day. It is a special kind; and some critics might even find it a paradoxical kind. The Prioress was more logical than many a modern lady, whose favourite cat (if he is anything of a logician) must be profoundly puzzled at being allowed to kill mice but not to kill birds. The same critic (if he were in a mood to be merely critical) might possibly describe the gentry of England as a nation of fox-hunters perpetually boasting that they are not bullfighters. But the critic would be too critical, if he implied that the inconsistency was an insincerity. There really is a particular kind of affection for animals, which is very marked among the modern English; and in some indefinable but very vivid fashion, it does rise up before us in the presence of this medieval English lady. Somehow, she does waft across the ages a delicately mingled atmosphere of refinement and fuss. It is indeed an error to suppose that our ancestors were merely barbarous and benighted to a man, about difficult questions like our relation to the lower animals; or that the notion of avoiding cruelty is merely new or modern. It is not even true, as some more sympathetic people imagine, that tenderness to wild animals was the isolated individual discovery of the great St. Francis of Assisi; original as he was in many ways. There are any number of old medieval stories about hermits and holy men who protected animals from the hunters, for instance; and might not have been so popular after all with the North Blankshire Hunt. It was a characteristic of St. Anselm a century before St. Francis. The truer way of stating the case is that men have always been pretty patchy and inconsistent in their attitude to animals, and that we ourselves are pretty patchy and inconsistent still. In every age there are a few who are very careful and many who are very careless, and a modern lady with a devotion to mice might find herself almost as much in a minority at a modern tea-table as did the Prioress at the Tabard.

I only mention the matter here, however, as another example of that almost creepy unconscious fashion, in which we can feel the mind of Chaucer beginning to work towards the things that afterwards went to make up the peculiar modern mood of the English nation. As I have suggested that there was something, so to speak, of pre-natal nationality about Chaucer's way of going about his business, I may add that there is an even more unmistakable social savour about Chaucer on a holiday. In all his remarks about his companions, as well as in his few remarks about himself, there is all that particular sort of self-effacing sociability which has really, when all cant is disposed of, made the English gentleman the best companion in the world. It has been complicated by all sorts of inconsistencies, and by many that have arisen since Chaucer's time. It has been often narrowed by aristocracy and sometimes soured by Puritanism, but it is there still; and in the Catholic Canterbury pilgrimage it is there already. It is marked off from the same kind of courtesy among Frenchmen or Italians by two unmistakable marks, which still exist; a certain casualness and flippancy, especially to fill up silences, and a certain half-conscious policy of avoiding deep disagreement on matters that really matter. Chaucer is all for letting sleeping dogs lie, including the greyhounds of the Prioress. He is not fond of fuss. He rather evades the questions asked of him, and does not mind looking more of a fool than he is. It is when I consider the man at this particular moment, in this particular aspect, in the hour of holiday when he was most himself, that a vague notion occurs to me that may be the explanation of the difficult problem of his politics.

Chaucer lived in a time that was the turning-point of English history; more truly the turning-point, I think, than even the time of Shakespeare. Being, like Chaucer, made free of a free religion, I do not admit that men or societies are bound to any inevitable doom. So I will not say that after what happened in the England of Chaucer, nobody could have avoided what happened in the England of Shakespeare. But I will say that in the time of Chaucer a turn was taken and a road was partly travelled, which it would have been necessary to retrace in order to avoid the destruction or transformation that lay ahead. What happened in Chaucer's time was that the Nobles broke the King, and could actually set up a new man to call himself King, though he was no more than a Noble. These things always happen by stages; and this could not have happened so early, except that the Noble was the nearest to the royal blood. But he was almost admittedly a usurper, and his success stood for the breakdown of many medieval principles that nobody before had ventured to break. What Chaucer himself thought of the political position we have no certain means of knowing. The catastrophe occurred late in his life, when he was probably willing enough to receive occasional help from the Court he had known in his youth, without interfering further in its quarrels. It has sometimes struck me as rather curious and interesting that when he addressed to the new King his humorous ballade about the emptiness of his purse, he accompanied that very broad hint with an Envoi which might have more meanings than one. It begins, 'O conqueror of Brutus' Albion' and, though he hastened to add more formal salutations, this might possibly be read as a reference to the violent and untraditional origin of the reign. Something of the same oddity has always struck me in Andrew Marvell's admirable Horatian Ode on Cromwell, which is supposed to be a compliment to Cromwell, but sounds to me like a prolonged sneer at him. The long parenthesis on the dignified and courageous death of Charles the First can hardly have been very cosy reading for Cromwell. And the last lines, about 'the same arts that did gain a power must it maintain', sound to me uncommonly like saying, 'You've got everything by brute force, and you'll jolly well have to hang on to it'. However this may be, I do not pretend that there is even this amount of criticism necessarily implied in Chaucer's action, when he addresses Henry of Bolingbroke as a Conqueror rather than a King. Still, it is one of those half-shades that seem faintly suggestive where all is shadowy; and I think it likely enough that Chaucer's mind was somewhat divided on the matter. On the one hand, he had been of the party and group of poets whose patron was John of Gaunt, the father of the usurper; on the other hand there is nothing to prove that John of Gaunt himself, let alone all his poets and protégés, would have approved entirely of the usurpation. Then, again, the tone of Chaucer's previous poem, addressed to the dethroned King before his dethronement, lends some support to the idea that he thought that prince was reckless or almost riding for a fall. He continually repeats, in no very courtly tone, that what the realm needs everywhere is Steadfastness; with the possible inference that its ruler was not sufficiently steadfast. This was certainly a charge made against Richard the Second, both in his own time and in ours, but here again the inference is very insufficient. To take another parallel from the age of Marvell; there were many Cavaliers who continually reproached Charles the First with his errors in the earlier stages, but who supported him at the last and to the last, from Wentworth who died for him on the scaffold to Falkland who died for him on the battlefield. I think, therefore, that there is very little that can be inferred from the fragmentary evidences of Chaucer's political attitude. He had been a diplomatist, but not a politician, and the common desire of almost every intelligent diplomatist is to keep as far as possible out of politics. He had been ready to represent the country and the court among foreigners, but it does not follow that he had any particular partisan interest in the quarrels of native factions among themselves. With the question of whether there was any political significance in his disappearance from office, and interlude of obscurity, I deal elsewhere.

In any case, all such speculations are conditioned by the great historical limitation called human life; the fact, too often forgotten, that such a man never saw the sequel that we see. Shakespeare, who on the whole upholds the legend of a lack of steadfastness in Richard the Second, could see far too much of what followed to think that steadfastness was secured by the accession of Henry the Fourth. Though Shakespeare seems on the whole Lancastrian in his sympathies, he was much more conscious of the inevitable perils of pitting Lancaster against York. He looked back at his princely but pathetic Richard, the last pure Plantagenet, across a valley of dry bones, of death and futile destruction; of which Chaucer could never have had a hint. There was no way in which the old court poet, brought up in the splendid court of the victorious Edward, could guess the ghastly evisceration of England by feudal rebels up to the exhausted peace of Bosworth. Chaucer was brought up in a time when the Lilies could be triumphantly quartered with the Leopards, as if France and England had become one country. He never knew that the time was coming when England would become two countries, or perhaps three or four countries, and her shield be quartered in a very different sense. Yet that disruption of England in the Wars of the Roses was of some curious concern to Chaucer, as a poet as well as a patriot. For I cannot but suppose that the desolation of that dynastic war was the explanation of something that needs not a little explaining; the comparative barrenness of the Chaucerian tradition in literature after his death. He had, if ever man did in the world, started a new impulse; yet it seemed to have stopped almost as soon as it started. It would be an exaggeration to say that we had no medieval poets before Chaucer and precious few after him. But there was nothing like the poetic progeny or dynasty we had every right to expect, until long afterwards when the Renaissance came to England. And I suspect it was due to the conqueror of Brutus' Albion, who did more by his example to encourage potential conquerors than to encourage potential poets. If Chaucer did expect steadfastness from the Lancastrian usurpation, he suffered a post-mortem punishment for his mistake.

Thus the readiness of Chaucer to support the party of the son of John of Gaunt, though regarded by good historians as probable, is certainly not proved. But I confess that I come to regard it as more probable, when I contemplate, as I am doing here, his curiously casual English attitude as expressed in the comedy of The Canterbury Tales. With so much about him of what has made the English glorious or generous or genial, there was something also of what has made them gullible and indifferent and too much controlled by events. Chaucer was not a snob, but he was something of what they call in America a regular guy or in England a clubable fellow or a man's man. I could easily believe that he was never so much in revolt against the success of Bolingbroke as Shakespeare was against the success of Burleigh; for Shakespeare was a tragic poet with a touch in him of the revolt of Timon. It is a possible fancy, where all is fanciful, that the greatest Englishman of that age did not rebel against the tragic turn of the age, because he was too English to be a rebel. He may even have been duped by that dull cynicism that talks about the need of practical politics, and then gives itself up to be plundered by practical politicians. He may have been so far infected by such opportunism as to accept Henry of Bolingbroke as a practical politician. He would not be the less English for having joined in the biggest blunder of English history. But I repeat that there is no proof of the fact; it is little more than a possibility, and it is a possibility that only interests me here because it goes along with all the other hints that there was already something in the medieval Englishman pointing towards the particular idiosyncrasies of the modern Englishman. It had nothing to do with the higher part of his mind and work, which was concerned with that everlasting light in which all things stand bright and solid; but on the lower level it is likely enough that he may have let things slide like sand. He may have let sleeping dogs lie; little knowing, like many another opportunist, that what he really did was to let slip the dogs of war.

There is one comment which may well be added at this point. It is agreed that in the modern sense of novelty, the production of new nostrums and notions, to be worked into systems like Socialism or Christian Science, Chaucer was not a man who troubled about ideas being new. It was quite enough for him, strange to say, that they were true. He was in many ways really conservative and even his talents did not lie in the direction of new definitions or demands. A critic might put it in the form of saying that Chaucer was a true son of the feudal system, in that he was even proud of being a dependent. He was, as we have seen, proud of being a dependent of the poet Ovid, a dependent of the philosopher Aristotle, a dependent of the theologian Aquinas. All this is true, and it is a truth that disposes at a blow of all the dreary attempts that have lately been made to represent medieval society as utterly servile or brutal or bigoted. Every man who has ever opened a book of Chaucer, every man who has ever opened the doors of Chaucer's mind and world, knows all that to be nonsense, even when it is nonsense supported by detailed or laborious learning. Chaucer was a great poet; he was a great man; but he was not a great revolutionist, not even in that sense a great reformer; certainly not a great iconoclast or heretic. He was not a man to hurl Bolshevist opinions like bombs into the crowd of conventional people with whom he lived so courteously and contentedly; he did not have them to throw, and he would not have thought them worth throwing; certainly not worth the explosion. If anybody thinks this sort of 'taking the world as he found it' a proof of littleness, such a person cannot be expected to accept my view of Chaucer's largeness. But the critic, in withdrawing the compliment from Chaucer, must withdraw the slander from the Middle Ages. It is quite certain that the reader of Chaucer instantly breathes an atmosphere of breezy and cordial brotherhood, of charity towards all sorts of men, of a sense of the worthlessness of rank and wealth in comparison with worth, of a sense of fundamental freedom and fraternity in the commonwealth of Christian men. These notions must have been normal medieval notions, or a man like Chaucer would never have had them, or bothered about them. He was not the sort to go digging for abnormal notions. There is that amount of truth in calling him a conservative or even a courtier. They must have been ideas that a man could casually express; or Chaucer would not have remained a court favourite all his life, when he was always expressing them so casually. If that is what is meant by denying originality to Chaucer, the charge is true. There was nothing of the New Morality about him; there was nothing of the man who wears no clothes in Hampstead or cannot keep cats because they are carnivorous. It was not so that he held the view that men of rank should be rebuked or that gentility was not mere ancestry. If these liberal sentiments had been fads in that sense, to the medieval mind, nobody with a notion of personal character can think that Geoffrey Chaucer would have joined the faddists. Some may hold, but I do not hold, that a man cannot be really original who has this huge appetite for what is normal. Anyhow, Chaucer had it, and he was so native to his age and country that his attitude must have seemed tolerably normal to them.

So far we have seen in faint outline a figure very familiar to us in modern literature and to some extent in modern life. He minds his own business; he does not talk shop; he is even content to remain under the mystical cloud of being Something in the City; he does not make scenes, and has a particular kind of limited politeness to servants; he is rather silent and yet somehow sociable, in the sense of being able to get on with other fellows at the club or (it is right to add) in the camp; he is manly; he is modest, at least in external manners; he is well-bred; he is well-groomed; he is solid and reasonable and reliable; but he has his good points, for all that. And the greatest of these is something that neither Puritanism nor the Public School has contrived to kill; he is generally fond of a joke. His great national contribution to the culture of Christendom has been that quality. It is the English sense of humour, like the Spanish sense of honour or the French sense of right reason. It is true that a certain sort of pompous ass like Sir Willoughly Patterne or Mr. Dombey has been exhibited as an Englishman; but he has generally been exhibited by Englishmen. Podsnap would not have been so absurdly English, if Dickens had not been an Englishman. True, there is only one Dickens, but there are a million Dickensians; a great many more Dickensians than there are Podsnaps. On the whole, the prevailing spirit of the English is an appreciation of this sort of fun, especially when it broadens into farce. Indeed, when it is properly understood, there is something in it that breaks out beyond the limits of mere farce, and becomes a sort of poetry of pantomime; a climax of anti-climax. Dickens is full of wild images that would be nothing if they were not funny. They would be not merely nonsensical but non-existent, if they were not (I say it with some firmness) so damned funny. Mrs. Todgers's wooden leg; Mr. Swiveller's gazelle who married a market-gardener; the toothpick of the gentleman next door, which if sent to the Commander-in-Chief would produce such marked results; the effect of Henry the Eighth's little peepy eyes on Mrs. Skewton's view of history; these are things that would simply cease to exist in a really rational universe. They are not symbolic; they are not really satiric. They are upheld by an invisible power and lifted without support upon the wings of laughter; by a power more unanswerable and more irresponsible than pure beauty.

Now compared with the fun of Dickens, there is certainly something altogether shrewd, sensible and solid about the humour of Chaucer. He was, as has been said already, only the seed of that separate growth; but it was growing separate and it was soon to be growing wild. We shall note elsewhere the way in which the medieval common sense of Chaucer differs from the almost maniac laughter we sometimes hear from the Elizabethans, even from Shakespeare. But for all that a frontier had been crossed, and there is already in Chaucer an element of irrational humour, which is not the same as the old rational humour. The old humour had been a form of satire. Chaucer often sounds satirical; yet Chaucer was not strictly a satirist. Perhaps the shortest way of putting it is to say that he already inhabits a world of comicality that is not a world of controversy. He makes fun of people, in the exact sense of getting fun out of them for himself. He does not make game of them, in the actual sense of hunting them down and killing them like wild vermin or public pests. He does not want the Friar and the Wife of Bath to perish; one would sometimes suspect that he does not really want them to change. Anyhow, a softening element of this sort has got into his satire, even if he really meant it for satire. But, with this step, he is already on the road to the Dickensian lunatic-asylum of laughter; because he is valuing his fools and knaves and almost wishing (as it were) to preserve them in spirits—in high spirits. In a hundred other ways his humour is English, and not least in this, that he often uses flippancy to avoid an argument and not to provoke it.

For I have so far confined myself strictly to considering what (unfortunately) a great mass of modern Englishmen mean by an Englishman. I have taken the matter from this end, so to speak, and started with the strictly national type produced by Protestantism and the modern division of nations. And I have pointed out that, even in terms of this familiar type, Chaucer is readily recognizable as English: that he contains the seeds of some of the things that have since become even extravagantly English. But I apologize to England for talking as if these things alone were English; and to Chaucer for supposing that he did not know and love an England that was relatively free from all these things. There is matter much larger than these little social tricks in the real heritage of the English; and Chaucer was the true trustee of that heritage; above all of the great national heritage of humour. It is the custom to boast that it is more than wit, but the really interesting truth is that it is more even than humour. It is not merely a critical quality; in a sense it is even a creative quality; a sort of crooked creation that is called the fantastic or the topsy-turvy. Here again it is possible to quote things from Chaucer that seem to have come into the world centuries too early, and to be of the type of the nursery nonsense of to-day. That this wild spirit runs through all English literature can be proved by a single quotation from Lear. I do not mean the comic Lear but the tragic Lear; who was almost equally nonsensical. There was never a crazy touch in that crack-brained style done better than that of Shakespeare's fool, when he says:

'This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.'

This poetry also Mr. Lewis Carroll shall make; but Chaucer lives before his time. Even in the Father of English Poetry that far-off cry of pure folly can be heard, perhaps for the first time in human history.

There is in English humour something that can not only be compared to art for art's sake, but might more truly be described as adventure for adventure's sake. It is not unconnected with the sense in which the more honourable part of English conquest and colonization was adventure for adventure's sake. I mean that it was not really directed towards a consistent policy of rule. Grave historians have expressed a mild astonishment that the British were so long unconscious of the British Empire. It is a possible explanation, to suppose that they were unconscious of it because it did not exist. It was not an empire in the logical sense of an imperium; a scheme for extending a type of civilization over countries that had not got it; as other empires wished to extend the Roman Law or the Spanish religion. It had first the practical purpose of trade; but after that its purpose might more truly be described as fun; the satisfaction of seeing strange places—and leaving them strange. If we like to put it so, the adventurer had something nobler than greed; which was curiosity. Now that curiosity always delighted in curiosities. They were like the curios that sailors brought home from strange seas; parrots and monkeys and tropical shells. But there was even more interest in the curiosities the sailor could not exactly bring home to his landlady; such as Cannibal Kings or Chinese temples or Arctic whales. There runs through the English adventure the vague desire that these funny things should remain funny. He does not specially wish to convert the yellow men in the temple; though he might attempt a constitutional compromise about cannibalism. And there runs through the English humour the same notion of amusing monsters, to be stared at. And Chaucer is at the spring of this spirit; because to him the Wife of Bath is an amusing monster. We do not approve of her; but we do not feel responsible for her, any more than for a whale or a white elephant. There is a wise fool whose eyes are in the ends of the earth; and the English invented that phrase of yet more imaginative folly: 'The other end of nowhere.'

It is a very extraordinary fact, when considered historically, that Chaucer should have been so unmistakably English almost before the existence of England. It is the details of language, like the details of landscape, that give this entirely unique and unmistakable touch. It is an elvish touch, to use a term that was actually used about the poet. It almost suggests that the other name of England is Elfland. Yet it has nothing whatever of the thin ethereal spirit of faerie; as we see it, for instance, in the Celtic myths and the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats. It is a solid and almost smug sort of goblin market; a real town where the goblins are really marketing. The nearest we can come to a more serious definition is that it is a certain spirit of nonsense even in landscape. We find it in the names of some real English villages, which might have come out of the wild geography books of Mr. Edward Lear. We feel it in some of the impossible places invented by Mr. Edward Lear, which might be the names of real English villages, valleys or downs; such as that typical title, 'The Hills of the Chankly Bore'.

Now this touch is instantly felt in Chaucer. The Pilgrims' Way does not run merely, in the medieval manner, through meadows patterned with flowers or forests dark with enchantment. But neither does it run merely through reasonable and recognizable places like Southwark and Sittingbourne. There is something selective in the eye of Chaucer, which is already open for other and special things. Nobody at home with the nonsense element I mean can read that phrase, in the account of the pilgrimage, about passing a town 'which that i-clepd is Bob-Up-and-Down', without his heart leaping with joy, and bobbing up and down with that buoyant and unconquerable city. I do not know exactly what it means; and there have been all sorts of speculations about it. I do not know whether Chaucer made it up out of his own head, which is quite possible; or whether it was a real English village, which is also quite possible; or whether it was a nickname connected with some local jest, which is perhaps most probable. Some have suggested that it was so called because something in the winding, rising and falling road made it appear to be on different levels at different stages; and that sort of rambling road probably was then, and certainly is now, rather specially characteristic of the English countryside. But the feeling of the curious primeval kinship between England and Chaucer is justified in either case. I do not care whether it was something that England invented and Chaucer glorified; or whether it was something that Chaucer invented and England glorified. The spirit of a man who loves that landscape can sometimes run so close to the land, that it invents something that exists already. I remember composing, when I was quite young, the first rough form of a song about the round hills and rolling, almost revolving roads, of which a man dreams after a day in Sussex. In that song I invented an entirely imaginary town of Roundabout as the mystic centre of this rotatory landscape. And it was some time afterwards that I discovered that there really is a town in Sussex called Roundabout, because the men of Sussex had seen the same scenes and dreamed the same dream.

Therefore there is, it seems, something primitive about this poet, because he is as large as the land and as old as the nation. There was little enough in him of the mystic, in the narrow or special sense; yet it is impossible not to feel something mystical about his magnitude as an emblem of England. He had somehow got into his head and into his note-book a certain national quality, centuries before the nation attempted to understand or describe its own quality. He had, for instance, the humour that is at once broadened and blunted by good humour. He had the particular sort of soft-heartedness that can be seen in the English; sometimes an incomplete and illogical sort; but not far removed from that of Chaucer's Prioress, who might have been frightened of a mouse, but wept over its being in a trap. He had the English type of tolerance and in some things the English type of irresponsible individualism; there is that amount of truth in Matthew Arnold's view that he was lacking in 'seriousness'. He was not the stuff of which Reformers are made. He took things as they came, and the world as he found it, and men as God had made them, or even as they had made themselves. He had a curious sort of abstract liberality underlying concrete conservatism, which was very national, and can be seen in many Tories who are devoted to a Monarchy and explain that it is just as republican as a Republic. In all this he is the First of The English; and his figure has therefore this quality of a type and even an archetype. That figure is seen in the sunlight of history walking among the gay pavilions and palaces of French kings and French-speaking knights and nobles; negotiating war and peace in what was practically a French quarrel about a French pedigree; he is seen learning a thousand things from the sonneteers of Italy and the troubadours of Provence; but within him something is born, and it is the name by which we live. He may or may not have made the somewhat dreary attempt to translate Le Roman de la Rose into English. But nobody could possibly translate The Canterbury Tales into French.

There is something personal about England. Rome or France or Bolshevist Russia or Republican America, each in its own way, is a principle; but England is a person. And it is very like the very indescribable sort of person this book has to describe. I will not be so daring as to define what William Blake meant by The Giant Albion; but we may agree that if the country called by poets Albion could be conceived as a single figure, it would be a giant. And when I think of Chaucer in this primary and general fashion, I do not think of a Court poet receiving a laurel from the King or a flagon from the King's butler, nor even of a stout and genial gentleman with a forked beard setting forth from the Tabard upon the Canterbury road; but of some such elemental and emblematic giant, alive at our beginnings and made out of the very elements of the land. Perhaps if we were caught up by that eagle that whirled away the poet to the gates of The House of Fame, we might begin to see spread out beneath us the titanic outlines of such a prehistoric or primordial Anak or Adam, with our native hills for his bones and our native forests for his beard; and see for an instant a single figure outlined against the sea and a great face staring at the sky.