For ever this brid will doon his busynes
To scape out of his cage when that he may;
His liberté the brid desireth aye …
Lo, heer hath kynd his dominacioun,
And appetyt flemeth (banishes) discrescioun.
Also a she wolf hath a vilayne kynde,
The lewideste wolf that she may fynde,
Or least of reputacioun, him will sche take,
In tyme whan hir lust to have a make.
Alle this ensaumples tell I by these men
That ben untrewe, and nothing by wommen.
(As the story from which these lines are quoted happens to be about an unfaithful wife, it seems that, in making the female sex immune from the action of the law of kind, Chaucer is indulging a little in irony.)
For men han ever a licorous appetit
On lower thing to parforme her delit
Than on her wyves, ben they never so faire,
Ne never so trewe, ne so debonaire.
Nature, deplorable as some of its manifestations may be, must always and inevitably assert itself. The law of kind has power even over immortal souls. This fact is the source of the poet’s constantly expressed dislike of celibacy and asceticism. The doctrine that upholds the superiority of the state of virginity over that of wedlock is, to begin with (he holds), a danger to the race. It encourages a process which we may be permitted to call dysgenics—the carrying on of the species by the worst members. The Host’s words to the Monk are memorable:
Allas! why wearest thou so wide a cope?
God give me sorwe! and I were a pope
Nought only thou, but every mighty man,
Though he were shore brode upon his pan (head)
Should han a wife; for all this world is lorn;
Religioun hath take up all the corn
Of tredyng, and we burel (humble) men ben shrimpes;
Of feble trees there cometh wrecchid impes.
This maketh that our heires ben so sclendere
And feble, that they may not wel engendre.
But it is not merely dangerous; it is anti-natural. That is the theme of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Counsels of perfection are all very well when they are given to those
That wolde lyve parfytly;
But, lordyngs, by your leve, that am not I.
The bulk of us must live as the law of kind enjoins.
It is characteristic of Chaucer’s conception of the world, that the highest praise he can bestow on anything is to assert of it, that it possesses in the highest degree the qualities of its own particular kind. Thus of Cressida he says:
She was not with the least of her stature,
But all her limbes so well answering
Weren to womanhood, that creature
Nas never lesse mannish in seeming.
The horse of brass in the Squire’s Tale is
So well proportioned to be strong,
Right as it were a steed of Lombardye,
Thereto so horsely and so quick of eye.
Everything that is perfect of its kind is admirable, even though the kind may not be an exalted one. It is, for instance, a joy to see the way in which the Canon sweats:
A cloote-leaf (dock leaf) he had under his hood
For sweat, and for to keep his head from heat.
But it was joye for to see him sweat;
His forehead dropped as a stillatorie
Were full of plantain or of peritorie.
The Canon is supreme in the category of sweaters, the very type and idea of perspiring humanity; therefore he is admirable and joyous to behold, even as a horse that is supremely horsely or a woman less mannish than anything one could imagine. In the same way it is a delight to behold the Pardoner preaching to the people. In its own kind his charlatanism is perfect and deserves admiration:
Mine handes and my tonge gon so yerne,
That it is joye to see my busynesse.
This manner of saying of things that they are joyous, or, very often, heavenly, is typical of Chaucer. He looks out on the world with a delight that never grows old or weary. The sights and sounds of daily life, all the lavish beauty of the earth fill him with a pleasure which he can only express by calling it a “joy” or a “heaven.” It “joye was to see” Cressida and her maidens playing together; and
So aungellyke was her native beauté
That like a thing immortal seemede she,
As doth an heavenish parfit creature.
The peacock has angel’s feathers; a girl’s voice is heavenly to hear:
Antigone the shene
Gan on a Trojan song to singen clear,
That it an heaven was her voice to hear.
One could go on indefinitely multiplying quotations that testify to Chaucer’s exquisite sensibility to sensuous beauty and his immediate, almost exclamatory response to it. Above all, he is moved by the beauty of “young, fresh folkes, he and she”; by the grace and swiftness of living things, birds and animals; by flowers and placid, luminous, park-like landscapes.
It is interesting to note how frequently Chaucer speaks of animals. Like many other sages, he perceives that an animal is, in a certain sense, more human in character than a man. For an animal bears the same relation to a man as a caricature to a portrait. In a way a caricature is truer than a portrait. It reveals all the weaknesses and absurdities that flesh is heir to. The portrait brings out the greatness and dignity of the spirit that inhabits the often ridiculous flesh. It is not merely that Chaucer has written regular fables, though the Nun’s Priest’s Tale puts him among the great fabulists of the world, and there is also much definitely fabular matter in the Parliament of Fowls. No, his references to the beasts are not confined to his animal stories alone; they are scattered broadcast throughout his works. He relies for much of his psychology and for much of his most vivid description on the comparison of man, in his character and appearance (which with Chaucer are always indissolubly blended), with the beasts. Take, for example, that enchanting simile in which Troilus, stubbornly anti-natural in refusing to love as the law of kind enjoins him, is compared to the corn-fed horse, who has to be taught good behaviour and sound philosophy under the whip:
As proude Bayard ginneth for to skip
Out of the way, so pricketh him his corn,
Till he a lash have of the longe whip,
Then thinketh he, “Though I prance all biforn,
First in the trace, full fat and newe shorn,
Yet am I but an horse, and horses’ law
I must endure and with my feeres draw.”
Or, again, women with too pronounced a taste for fine apparel are likened to the cat:
And if the cattes skin be sleek and gay,
She will not dwell in housé half a day,
But forth she will, ere any day be dawet
To show her skin and gon a caterwrawet.
In his descriptions of the personal appearance of his characters Chaucer makes constant use of animal characteristics. Human beings, both beautiful and hideous, are largely described in terms of animals. It is interesting to see how often in that exquisite description of Alisoun, the carpenter’s wife, Chaucer produces his clearest and sharpest effects by a reference to some beast or bird:
Fair was this younge wife, and therewithal
As any weasel her body gent and small …
But of her song it was as loud and yern
As is the swallow chittering on a barn.
Thereto she coulde skip and make a game
As any kid or calf following his dame.
Her mouth was sweet as bragot is or meath,
Or hoard of apples, laid in hay or heath.
Wincing she was, as is a jolly colt,
Long as a mast and upright as a bolt.
Again and again in Chaucer’s poems do we find such similitudes, and the result is always a picture of extraordinary precision and liveliness. Here, for example, are a few:
Gaylard he was as goldfinch in the shaw,
or,
Such glaring eyen had he as an hare;
or,
As piled (bald) as an ape was his skull.
The self-indulgent friars are
Like Jovinian,
Fat as a whale, and walken as a swan.
The Pardoner describes his own preaching in these words:
Then pain I me to stretche forth my neck
And east and west upon the people I beck,
As doth a dove, sitting on a barn.
Very often, too, Chaucer derives his happiest metaphors from birds and beasts. Of Troy in its misfortune and decline he says: Fortune
Gan pull away the feathers bright of Troy
From day to day.
Love-sick Troilus soliloquizes thus:
He said: “O fool, now art thou in the snare
That whilom japedest at lovés pain,
Now art thou hent, now gnaw thin owné chain.”
The metaphor of Troy’s bright feathers reminds me of a very beautiful simile borrowed from the life of the plants:
And as in winter leavés been bereft,
Each after other, till the tree be bare,
So that there nis but bark and branches left,
Lieth Troilus, bereft of each welfare,
Ybounden in the blacke bark of care.
And this, in turn, reminds me of that couplet in which Chaucer compares a girl to a flowering pear-tree:
She was well more blissful on to see
Than is the newe parjonette tree.
Chaucer is as much at home among the stars as he is among the birds and beasts and flowers of earth. There are some literary men of to-day who are not merely not ashamed to confess their total ignorance of all facts of a “scientific” order, but even make a boast of it. Chaucer would have regarded such persons with pity and contempt. His own knowledge of astronomy was wide and exact. Those whose education has been as horribly imperfect as my own will always find some difficulty in following him as he moves with easy assurance through the heavens. Still, it is possible without knowing any mathematics to appreciate Chaucer’s descriptions of the great pageant of the sun and stars as they march in triumph from mansion to mansion through the year. He does not always trouble to take out
