In 1938, according to John Ayre (147), Frye read a paper on Chaucer to the Graduate English Club at the University of Toronto, a paper originally written for his Oxford tutor, Edmund Blunden. “A Reconsideration of Chaucer,” a revision and expansion of the earlier paper, incorporates about three-fifths of the essay Frye wrote for Blunden on Chaucer’s early poems in October 1936, and it is about fifty percent longer than the earlier effort, a handwritten manuscript in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 12. Frye wrote three essays on Chaucer for Blunden, and “A Reconsideration of Chaucer” might well incorporate portions of the other two papers, which have not been preserved. Frye’s text for Chaucer was apparently the first edition (1933) of F.N. Robinson’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. The references in square brackets following Frye’s quotations (e.g., 1720–2: 478) are to the line and page numbers of Robinson’s second edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). References to lines in Troilus and Criseyde are preceded by the number of the book (e.g., 5.1856–7: 479). The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 4.
If I should be asked why I am reading a paper on Chaucer with so arrogant a title when so many among my audience know infinitely more about Chaucer than I do, I can only plead that I have a special interest in Blake. Blake’s essay on The Canterbury Tales1 outlines a method of criticizing Chaucer which I have ventured to apply to the minor poems and to Troilus and Criseyde, that is all. The original reconsideration of Chaucer is Blake’s, not mine; and my approach to Chaucer includes a private conviction that Blake’s essay is as revolutionary a document in the history of Chaucerian criticism as Tyrwhitt’s edition itself.2 Quotations from Chaucer will be given in modern English, for obvious reasons.3
It is always safe to begin with platitudes. In the history of European culture Renaissance succeeds to Gothic. Gothic culture is produced by a social system which also produces a landed aristocracy, a feudal economy, and a Catholic religion. Renaissance culture emerges in towns, among a strong mercantile class whose interests are generally protected by a despot—even big nations with many towns are strongly centralized in the Renaissance period. Renaissance religion may call itself Catholic or Protestant, but in either case is state religion. The feudal system was never so strongly entrenched in Italy as it was in northern Europe: Renaissance conditions prevailed there, more or less, from the Dark Ages on; and Italy, therefore, took the lead during the Renaissance proper. Chaucer, who owed so much to Italy, is on the threshold of the Italian Renaissance: he had not been dead many years when Masaccio was painting in the Brancacci Chapel. When anything like a Renaissance came to England, Chaucer had been dead so long that his prayer in Troilus and Criseyde had gone unanswered:
So preye I god that noon miswrite thee,
Ne the mismetre for defaute of tonge. [5.1795–6: 479]
And yet the fourteenth century in England was obviously as much on the eve of a Renaissance as it was in Italy. The middle class was rapidly growing in power and wealth, chiefly through the export of wool, and in the normal course of events we should expect that very soon after Chaucer’s time it would, aided by a strong king, destroy the old landowner class. This revolution was achieved under the Tudors, but everything in Chaucer’s time pointed directly towards it. The new spirit of nationalism which arose under Edward III was rapidly growing into a nationalistic religion. William of Occam proves in the schools that nations are realities and that Christendom is an abstraction; and the writings of Wycliffe and his followers urge the power of the secular state against that of the pope. Piers Plowman and Richard the Redeless are full of bitter reproaches against a weak king for not welding the nation into a single unit. However conservative Langland may be in his view of society, it is obvious that for him the king and a nation of industrious workers are the functional elements in it: the nobility and an ultramontane clergy are considered, more or less explicitly, as anarchic and disruptive forces.
This situation was, however, complicated by the Black Death, which raised the price of labour to such an extent that for the first time since the Norman Conquest the proletariat emerges as a second revolutionary class. In the face of this new threat to their interests, the landowning and mercantile classes combined and established the Lancastrian reaction. There was, perhaps, no more actual misery among the poorer classes in the fifteenth century than there was in the fourteenth under the Statute of Labourers,4 though I am open to correction on this point. But there is something about a historical retrogression which crushes and stamps out culture, whatever the economic conditions are; for a change in a social system which may affect the working class very little may mean a great deal to the creative artist or scholar. In the fifteenth century the acknowledged poet laureate is not a Chaucer complaining about his empty purse, but a sleek and well-fed Lydgate. The one philosopher between Wycliffe and the Oxford reformers, Pecock, came much nearer the stake than ever Wycliffe did, in spite of his impeccable orthodoxy. We used to be told, of course, that the Middle Ages were full of fanatical obscurantism and a morbid liking for damnation and decomposition. That is no more true of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than of the age of Hitler and Salvador Dali; but, in that sense of the word medieval, the fifteenth century is the most medieval century in English culture. Its most original and typical art form is the danse macabre, and its only dispenser of impartial justice is death.
But the second half of the fourteenth century remains the prelude to the frustrated and postponed English Renaissance. Its vitality is amazing: the Peasants’ Revolt and the rise of Lollardry are monuments of its genius quite as impressive as the poetry of Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl poet, and the Wakefield dramatist. In Duns Scotus scholastic philosophy had produced one of the finest critical intellects of any age; the startling and uncompromising paradoxes of William of Occam followed and led straight into the more explicitly revolutionary thought of Wycliffe. The intellectual development of England during this period was more exciting, more fearless—because less systematically restrained by censorship—and less sentimental than it was to be again for centuries—perhaps more centuries than have yet elapsed. The psychological effect of the Black Death as a catalyser for the revolutionary thought of the time must have been very great, but is a difficult factor to assess.
Similarly, literature seems to draw more vitality from all classes of society, from court to cottage, than it has ever done since. It is more truly the expression of a national consciousness than even Elizabethan literature outside of Shakespeare, as it is much more firmly integrated with the lower as well as with the upper and middle classes. The radical element in the thought of Langland, for instance, should not be underestimated, as it tends to be at present, because it has been wrongly interpreted. Langland did not write a political poem; nor, in spite of his insistence that there are good and bad in all classes, did he write a moral poem. His work is theological, symbolic, and visionary, and only after we have seen through the anagogic form of his argument as it develops from the A to the C text5 can we get any idea of the real power of his mind. We have no space to discuss in detail all the points that Langland makes in his poem, but we may refer to the well-known fact that in his approach to Christianity he cuts straight through centuries of established hierarchy to the original proletarian cult recorded in the New Testament. No other poet of English literature except Blake ever got this far: even such great revolutionary geniuses as Milton and Shelley, to say nothing of revolutionary poets of our own day, fall a long way short of it. But Langland’s is not an isolated achievement, even if we deny that a committee sat on his poem, for the same thing is done, and done quite as well in a different way, in Secunda Pastorum.
There is nothing of this in Chaucer, but even in Chaucer we are often reminded that a unified religious impulse is almost emerging. We cannot call it Protestantism, for the simple reason that Protestantism arose in the sixteenth century under very different social and intellectual conditions, but neither is it the Catholicism of the preceding century. Whatever we call it, it is a religious impulse much less dependent on class selfishness than most religious impulses are and is capable of giving certain ultimate refinements in art which, say, the Elizabethan age does not provide. Take the last words of Chaucer’s Troilus:
But trewely, Criseyde, swete may,
Whom I have ay with al my myght yserved,
That ye thus doon, I have it nat deserved. [5.1720–2: 478]
There is no sermon on original sin and the frailty of woman. Troilus knows only that he has been hurt, and he sticks to that. According to conventional Christian morality, Criseyde was a prostitute; according to the morality of courtly love, she was something far worse. Troilus calls her “maiden.”
O Cressid! O false Cressid! false, false, false!
Let all untruths stand by thy stained name,
And they’ll seem glorious. [Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.178–80]
That is Shakespeare’s Troilus. “O blood, blood, blood!” howls Othello [3.3.451]. Whether Shakespeare was capable of a touch like this of Chaucer or not, it is certain that no character he created ever was.
We shall come to this question of Chaucer’s religious attitude again: all we are concerned with just now is the fact that the half-century between the Black Death and the death of Chaucer is a cultural unity as much as the baroque, rococo, or Victorian periods are. The inner conflicts are intense, but they are a sign of vitality, and from one very important point of view the resemblances are more profound and significant than the differences. It is an error of fact to call Langland a Lollard or a sympathizer with John Ball; but it is not an error of interpretation to see underlying connections among all three. Such a method of approach to any age in history is concerned above all to examine that age as far as humanly possible in terms of its own standards. We have had enough, for example, of the critic who ascribes to Chaucer a sneaking sympathy with the ideas of Voltaire because the critic himself is revolting against a Yahwistic mother. Even more responsible criticism is apt to assume an impossible antithesis between “medieval” and “modern” attitudes, in which case it is not difficult to prove that Chaucer was “essentially” either. Chaucer is not “essentially” anything but Chaucer, however, and Chaucer lived in the age of Wycliffe and Langland. At the same time it is undoubtedly true that he is a uniquely cosmopolitan figure. He drew both from the humanistic Italy of Petrarch and Boccaccio and from the still feudal and medieval France of Jean de Meung. The cultural unity of fourteenth-century England is expressed very well by Langland and Wycliffe; but if we want to see this period in its relation to European culture as a whole we have to turn to Chaucer.
A poem is a particular selection of universal experience: consequently, the real greatness of a poet is estimated in two ways: by the very general argument which presents the range and scope of his thought and his constructive ability and by the minute analysis of his technique. A critic who has the strength of mind to grapple with the former is generally not afraid to be pedantic about the latter. Chaucer begins his poetic career with translations: if we can construct out of these a working model of Chaucer’s mind, we shall be better able to understand his attitude as an independent poet. Let us take the very early ABC, which is a translation of a French poem by one Deguilleville.6 I choose this largely because Professor Robinson says in his edition: “The ABC being only a translation, reveals very little about Chaucer.”7 We shall see.
In Deguilleville we at once notice that the rhyme is only part of a much larger scheme of assonance. His stanza is longer than Chaucer’s, but he has only two rhymes against Chaucer’s three, his scheme being aaba abbb abba and Chaucer’s ababbcbc. But the important difference is that Deguilleville varies his rhymes as little as possible while Chaucer contrasts his: some of Deguilleville’s stanzas are actually constructed on one rhyme alone, and when he does have two, rhyme b is as close to rhyme a, both in sound and meaning, as he can get it. His rhymes for stanza D are: miséricorde, recorde, racordé, concorde, discorde, descordé, accordé, concordé, corde, recordé, encordé, orde [37–48]. All this ingenuity produces, of course, an extremely static effect—the rhymes are wedged together so tightly that the poem hardly gives any sense of movement or development.
Stanza G in Deguilleville opens with a quadruple pun. The poet addresses the Virgin as “mother” (mère), says that she is never “marah” or bitter (amere) in earth or sea (mer); and, of course, we are supposed to remember that her name is Mary and that she is known as stella maris, which reinforces the reference to the sea. That takes up three lines. Having run out of “mères,” Deguilleville goes on to “père,” and actually succeeds in completing eight lines with that sound. The last line ends with “frère,” but then the bell rings, so to speak, and he has to start a new stanza [73–84]. This is Chaucer:
Glorious mayde and mooder, which that nevere
Were bitter, neither in erthe nor in see,
But ful of swetnesse and of merci evere,
Help that my Fader be not wroth with me.
Spek thou, for I ne dar not him ysee,
So have I doon in erthe, alias the while!
That certes, but if thou my socour bee,
To stink eterne he wole my gost exile. [49–56: 525]
Deguilleville’s stanza is based on the fact that “mère” rhymes with “père”; Chaucer’s, on the sharp antithesis between the mercy of the divine mother and the wrath of the divine father. One of the most elemental of human emotions, which is not the less powerful for being called an Oedipus complex, vitalizes the dry bones of conventional piety, and the stanza takes on the organic tension of something alive. Notice how the thrust and counterthrust of “maid” and “mooder,” “bitter” and “sweetness,” “earth” and “sea,” build up from the “mooder” of the first line to the climacteric “Fader” of the fourth. Notice how unobtrusive Chaucer’s rhyme is, “never-ever,” and yet how subtly it fits into the antithetical scheme. True, Deguilleville has most of the materials for these antitheses: “vierge mère,” “en terre ne en mer,” and “amere” against “douceur” [73, 75, 74, and 76]; but it is hard to achieve freedom under the dictatorship of one vowel, and any movement they might have given the stanza is completely lost in the roar of assonance.
In Chaucer’s last line we have an association of three entirely negative ideas. To make hell a place of flames and torture adds a certain majestic splendor to horror, but a hell like a dung heap on which abandoned corpses are flung is merely degrading and shameful. There is some dignity to a human “soul” in hell, for the soul is immortal and intelligent, but a “ghost,” the shadow of life, has no dignity and very little pathos. Again, to be “condemned” to hell suggests the Promethean rebel, but to be exiled there is merely to be contemptuously dismissed as undesirable. The picture of hopeless misery made from these three words is all the more poignant at the end of a stanza opening with the word “glorious.” And of this last line there is not the slightest hint in Deguilleville.
If Chaucer can do this to a translation, it is hardly to be expected that when he emerges as an independent poet he should be less individual in his utterance. It is his business to carry on the poetic tradition as he finds it in his own way; but that tradition has been formed by poets he admires and respects: Machaut, Deschamps, and the authors of the Roman de la Rose in France, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy. Here an entirely new problem arises.
Medieval culture before Chaucer had reached its highest development with the poetry of Dante and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas had constructed a system of thought in which everything focused on the proposition that reality lay in universals, in wholes rather than parts. The life of an individual is temporary and fluctuating, but at every moment he is in touch with realities which are eternal. The states of mind through which the individual passes are common to all men, therefore universal, therefore more real than the individual himself. The question, therefore, arises: what literary forms result from the belief that universals rather than individuals are real?
Two things immediately become obvious. In the first place, symbolism must be the basis of medieval art. In the second place, most of the mental energy of the time was absorbed in correlation. Medieval science was inclined to regard the world as complicated rather than complex, because a world in which universals were real would be one which could be explained in very simple formulae, such as the cardinal numbers. And we should expect this tendency to association of ideas, as shown in the endless attempts to interrelate all possible groups of three, four, seven, and twelve, to find counterparts in literature.
Thus, we find in Chaucer’s poetry standard symbolic patterns like the game of chess and the elaborate anatomical description of the beloved lady which meet us in The Book of the Duchess [614–69, 939–60: 273, 276], and the astrological and mythological frameworks of such poems as the Complaint of Mars.8 We find also a tendency to place a particular poem in a category, The Legend of Good Women being an obvious example; and on a smaller scale there is the convention of the catalogue. The House of Fame is full of catalogues, and its account of the wonders in the House of Rumour is of an exuberance surpassed only by the world’s greatest master of the catalogue, Rabelais.9
Medieval poetry, then, like medieval philosophy and science, is based on a technique of correlating and associating ideas in a search for universals, and as this means the use of symbolism, there must be some transcendent symbol of perfect unity to hold all other symbols together. The required symbol would inevitably be love, for it is the function of love, in whatever aspect, to unite.
As regards form, the theme of love can be treated objectively or subjectively. The former gives us the epic or dramatic form of the love poem; the latter the lyric form. The objective treatment would require, we have seen, a symbolic framework, and would be more concerned with an archetypal love than with the frailties of individual lovers. It will, therefore, present a unity which holds up the mirror, not to nature, but to thought, or rather the imagination which produces thought. This gives us the form of the vision and the convention of the dream, as used by Chaucer in his four most important minor poems, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women. The lyric forms do not concern us: the most important is the complaint.
As regards subject matter, the love can obviously be either sacred or profane. In the latter case love poetry would be cast in the convention of courtly love. The present paper is forced, through exigencies of space, to omit all explanation of courtly love as it is set out in Mr. Lewis’s brilliant work, The Allegory of Love. All we can say is that it was Chaucer’s business as a court poet to produce poems in this convention.
But Chaucer came to the courtly love convention after many able French poets had exhausted its possibilities. Chaucer could add little organically new to the encyclopedic Roman de la Rose; yet he could not break away from it altogether. There was only one thing he could do— to transform courtly love poetry into visionary comedy, rich in humour and lightness. By comedy I do not mean parody or ridicule: there was far too much satire in the Roman de la Rose itself for Chaucer to be much interested in that approach. But many conventions do pass through a comic stage before they disappear; and when writers approach a convention in this indirect, sophisticated way it is a sign that the direct approach has become worn out. To Chaucer’s minor poems perhaps The Rape of the Lock will offer an analogy. The Rape of the Lock is a comic adaptation of the classical epic, and while it is not a parody of Homer or Virgil, it does reflect Boileau’s doctrine that a serious treatment of this form, whether in pagan or Christian terms, was no longer appropriate for poetry.10
And if Chaucer’s poetry had ended with The Parliament of Fowls, there would be no more to say than this. But Chaucer also belongs to the period following St. Thomas and Dante; he comes after the assaults of Scotus, Occam, and Wycliffe on Thomism, and belongs to a world which had, outside the schools at least, begun to accept the doctrine of nominalism we hold today, that reality inheres in the individual and that the universal is an abstract idea or mental image. Chaucer’s technique at its greatest, in Troilus and Criseyde and the later portions of The Canterbury Tales, is concerned primarily with individuals rather than symbols and is in spirit closer to the drama than the vision. We, therefore, have to expand our conception of Chaucer as a great master of comedy. Everybody knows that Shakespeare is one of a group of Elizabethan dramatists and that he is one of the three or four greatest poets of the world, but it is often difficult even for an experienced Shakespearean scholar to keep both ideas always in his head at the same time. We have to make similar intellectual effort in regard to Chaucer: he is a product of fourteenth-century England, but he is also one of the greatest masters of comedy who ever lived, his level being the level of Horace and Mozart. Like Mozart, he comes at a late stage of his particular culture, when the only possible attitude to the ideals of that culture was a quizzical and ironic attitude. And again like Mozart, he lived in a prerevolutionary time—the fact that the revolution did not come off for another century does not really alter Chaucer’s position. He feels that some sort of upheaval is coming, but he presents his feeling in a summarized way, with exactly the same sort of indirect suggestion that he adopts toward the conventions of the past. Had such an upheaval come directly after Chaucer’s time, a great revolutionary genius would doubtless have followed Chaucer as Beethoven followed Mozart, or, in our own day, as Picasso has followed Cézanne.
The difference of social conditions in Italy and France makes it difficult to see the transitional nature of the fourteenth century in Europe as a whole; and about the only place where a cultural development parallel to England’s was taking place was in Siena. And of all the great men of the fourteenth century perhaps only two succeeded in making a unity out of Italian and French cultures, Chaucer and Simone Martini; and there are (to me) many parallels between these two artists. But the Sienese Renaissance also came to grief, though not so completely—witness the great Passion frescos of Simone’s pupil Barna in the San Gimignano cathedral11—and the relation of Simone to Duccio or Giotto has not a little in common with the relation of Chaucer to Dante.
There are two Chaucers, then, that we have to deal with: the smaller Chaucer who transformed a great romantic convention into great comedy and the larger Chaucer who is, perhaps, the greatest creative artist of fourteenth-century Europe, the century of growing nations and vernacular literatures, a century as Franciscan as the thirteenth was Dominican. The former is the Chaucer of the minor poems; the latter the Chaucer of Troilus and Criseyde.
In The Book of the Duchess, a consolatory poem addressed to John of Gaunt on the death of his wife, we have an elegy which is a synthesis of complaint and vision forms, the symbolic setting being the enchanted garden which we enter at the opening of the Roman de la Rose. Here, first of all, is the typical or generic story, that of Ceyx and Alcyone, followed by a dream. Now while a vision may be tragic, the dream, the experience of someone in a recumbent posture, tends toward comedy—the comedy suggested by such a title as Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaucer heightens the humour by his introduction of Morpheus, the drowsy god who opens one eye when a messenger bawls in his ear [178–85: 269], and the dream itself opens in the peacefulness of a May morning, with the sun shining and the birds singing on the roof [291–325: 270]. Professors Lowes and Kittredge have both dwelt on a curious feature of this poem—its use of the irresponsible haziness and arbitrary associations of an actual dream.12 But it seems to me that as the dreamer joins the hunt and enters the enchanted garden Chaucer is conveying a hint of a journey to an Elysium or a paradise. I would even venture the suggestion that the puppy, which comes running to meet the dreamer when he enters the garden, is the Cerberus of this paradise:
Hyt com and crepte to me as lowe,
Right as hyt hadde me yknowe,
Helde doun hys hed and joyned hys eres,
And leyde al smothe doun hys heres. [391–4: 271]
For, in spite of this puppy and in spite of Morpheus, the writing is only incidentally humourous: it really moves on a plane of easy serenity which is comedy at its finest and which, in spite of Arnold, is quite as high as the highest seriousness.13 Again, Lowes has well spoken of the stroke of genius by which Chaucer represents the dreamer as dull, in order to draw out the black knight and thereby express at once the husband’s grief and Chaucer’s sympathy with it.141 think there is more to it than that. The dreamer gets everything all wrong because he does not understand what the knight is saying: my impression is that if the dreamer were really to get into his head the idea that someone was actually suffering, he would wake up, and the paradise around him, in which nothing suffers, would vanish. And the reason for laying the scene in Elysium is, of course, that it is the only way of expressing the inevitable consolation offered to bereaved people: “the dead are better off.” For the poet to put his consolation in this form would be crude: for him to go to a place explicitly named paradise and see Blanche there would be equally crude. What this Elysian setting gives us is the suggestion that everything is all right in spite of the Man in Black’s grief, which is exactly the correct touch. The genius of a great poet and the tact of a great gentleman united to make this poem.15
The extremely conventional lament, with its many stock patterns— the succession of oxymorons leading into the tirade against Fortune [617–709: 273–4], with the rather tedious conceit of the chess game, the detailed description of the lady’s soul and body, and the extremely varied lists of references—all lead us to suspect that the formalizing of personal grief characteristic of the great elegies of the language is a virtue made of necessity. Death is so impartial and commonplace an event that it is difficult to describe a particular death in particular terms.
To recapitulate: Chaucer modelled his earlier work on literary conventions which established love as the normal content and the vision and complaint as standard forms of poetry. He came to these conventions, however, when they were worn out, and he broke through them to the individualized technique of his two great masterpieces. He did not take these conventions very seriously, and being a comic genius he made comedies out of them, preparatory to outgrowing them. This process, which we have seen operating in The Book of the Duchess, was in all essentials completed by The House of Fame, the Don Quixote of the medieval love vision.
Anyone who considers this an overstatement should simply read the poem as a unity, not as puzzled editors read it, as an extravaganza arbitrarily tacked on to a dull summary of the Aeneid. First, with regard to content. Chaucer, after hemming and hawing and clearing his throat for a hundred and ten lines, in the best manner of medieval prolixity, begins on a dream. He finds himself in a temple of glass, a perfect symbol of the imaginative, allegorical, visionary type of poetry he was breaking away from. Inexorably engraved on the walls of this temple is the well-worn story of Dido and Aeneas, the archetype of all lovers’ complaints. The poet plods along conscientiously, but finally announces that he is bored, and that anyone who wants more of the story can read it in Virgil. Then he says in effect: “I like this temple, but it is obviously no place for me”:
“A, Lord!” thoughte I, “that madest us,
Yet sawgh I never such noblesse
Of ymages, ne swich richesse,
As I saugh graven in this chirche;
But not woot I whoo did hem wirche,
Ne where I am, ne in what contree.” [470–5: 286]
Feeling the need of fresh air, he goes out into the open and finds himself alone in a desert. He does not say in so many words that the temple of glass has been smashed to pieces, but it has; the Chaucer in that desert is the potential author of Troilus and Criseyde. Then an eagle—Dante’s own eagle—catches him in his claws and whirls him up through the air. He explains to the terrified poet that because he has tried to write love poems but has never regarded the love conventions very seriously, he is to be taken to the House of Fame where he will be properly instructed in the subject [529–699: 287–8]. But, as Lowes remarks, Chaucer hears, in that House of Rumour, rumours of everything but love;16 he is utterly bewildered, and can make nothing of it beyond an immense confused noise. Just as he glimpses a man who seems to have some authority, and who looks as though he might explain everything, the poem ends. Or at least it stops, and editors say it is unfinished, but I am quite sure that there it ends, for it is exactly the right ending for this masterpiece of quizzical mockery. Surely the whole point about rumour is that it can always be tracked down to a source conveniently anonymous but alleged to be reputable, and it is never definite, though it is usually just going to be definite.
Similarly as regards form, the poem is the ultimate satire on the vision convention. Chaucer begins by solemnly enumerating the fifteen causes of dreams and making what we are to understand is a hair-splitting distinction between a “drem” and a “sweven” [1–65: 282], writes a double introduction to the first book as well as single ones to the other two, and impressively dates his dream twice. Now in a vision we have to make some sort of journey away from this world, and we can travel in one of three directions, down, up, or laterally. The vision of descent, the katabasis, is a common one: it meets us in classical journeys to the underworld, such as we find in the eleventh book of the Odyssey or the sixth book of the Aeneid, and in Biblical initiation symbols such as Daniel in the lion’s den, his associates in the fiery furnace, and Jonah in the fish’s belly. In book 1 Chaucer leaves Aeneas just at the entrance of his journey to the underworld, but refuses point blank to follow him.17 The vision of ascent, which might be called, and which I am certainly going to call, the anabasis, the mounting up to a height from whence one may see all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, is equally common, and would, of course, be familiar to any reader of the Paradiso, including Chaucer. Book 2 is devoted to the poet’s highly edifying but very reluctant journey through the spheres. And the visions of strange marvels in remote lands, which haunt us in so much medieval literature, and return to haunt us in the Squire’s Tale, are the theme, more or less summarized, of the third book.
I wish I had time and space to analyse the technique of this superb tour de force in more detail. The dominating symbol is wind: even inside the breathless temple of glass Aeneas is blown out of Troy by Aeolus, wind ruffles the hair of Venus, and a tempest again drives Aeneas to the Cumaean Sibyl, where Chaucer abandons him [203–8, 229–30, 433–40: 284, 286]. Wind presumably sounds in Chaucer’s ears along with aquiline oratory, and in book 3 Aeolus reappears as master of ceremonies, the House of Fame itself entering on a terrific sweep of wind [1583–1601: 297]. And with wind goes harangue: the preliminary harangues, the harangue of Dido in book 1, the endless harangues of the eagle, who incidentally points the connection by informing his charge that all words are air, and, finally, the rhetoric in the recital of the immense catalogue of things that go spinning and whirling around the poet’s ears in the magnificent climax at the end.18 The poem is, in one of its many aspects, a gorgeous satire on verbiage.
I am also inclined to think that if the poem were carefully examined from this point of view, it would turn out to be as profound as it is brilliant and exuberant. It has been called a parody of Dante,19 but that hardly covers the ground: it is a parody of the whole world outlook which produced Dante. For the poet, confused as he may pretend to be, an old world is being blown out, a world of vague inchoate abstractions, and a new world of real people comes in on the tempest. That, at least in my opinion, is the reason for the apocalyptic symbolism of the armies summoned by the seven trumpets of Aeolus [1623–1817: 297–9]. And Aeolus is summoned by the goddess Fortune [1568–95: 297], for in medieval symbolism Fortune is frequently history, and the turning of her wheel the movement of historical events.
The medieval habit of classifying men into types and of giving symbolic value to outward objects combined to produce the popular art form of the bestiary. The serious treatment of the bestiary is bound up with the branch of allegory known as fable—an example of it in our literature is The Hind and the Panther. But obviously the form also makes an excellent vehicle for satire—usually vicious satire, as practically all our abusive and contemptuous epithets are derived from the animal world. There is a suggestion of the satiric bestiary in some of the caricatures of Rowlandson, and something more than a suggestion in the opening of Volpone.20 The Parliament of Fowls has nothing of the saeva indignatio21 of that splendid and terrible play, but in it the mocking smile of The House of Fame broadens to a good-humoured grin.
In the opening of the poem Chaucer ruefully admits, with all the irony of Burns’s Address to the Deil [lines 109–14], that there must be many wonderful things concerning courtly love he knows nothing about, for the books say so. He reads of a dreamer who shoots up to the eighth sphere, where the ultimate certainties of heaven and hell are demonstrated to him. Chaucer, falling asleep, flies with that dreamer to the garden of romance, where he is to be similarly assured of the truth of bookish accounts of love. He conveniently forgets that he has tried this before.22
The poem eventually centres on a demande d’amour, or love debate, conducted by birds, with Mother Nature in the chair. Three tercel eagles love a formel eagle: only one can have her; which is it to be? Nearly all critics are convinced that Chaucer intended the different classes of birds to represent class distinctions in human society, and there seems no reason to doubt this.23 There is a marked cleavage between conservative and radical opinion: the aristocracy believe, with the authors of the books that have overawed Chaucer, in a transcendental, superhuman state of love and in its absolute permanence: once in love, the “true” lover will never, never, love anyone else. The vulgar herd, being of the new school of nominalists, believe that is not an objective state, but a relation between individual men and women. On this assumption the duck points out that, as there are plenty of females, the two disappointed tercels can go and find other partners [594–5: 317]: similarly the goose— a deliciously flustered, spluttering Mistress Quickly of a goose— assumes that if love ceases on the woman’s side it will tend to cease on the man’s [566–7: 316]. The aristocrats run true to type. They receive this with shouts of laughter and annihilating snubs, and the gentle turtle is distressed [575–88: 317]. They, of course, have the last word, for the nicer points of amour courtois etiquette can be appreciated only by the leisured upper classes, and this particular demande d’amour is, quite properly, an affair of eagles. They must, then, be right, just as Chaucer’s books must be right. So two of the tercels must remain loving and unloved. But as they all share equally in the state called love, it is unfair to give the preference to any, so all three should remain celibate. That seems to be the logical conclusion, but we have begun to suspect this logic, and we are hardly reassured when the ascetic solution is gravely propounded by that notorious emblem of all sexual unrighteousness, the cuckoo [603–9: 317]. A volley of abuse is immediately hurled at the cuckoo’s head, but as his argument is unanswerable, the debate is at a standstill.
Through the clamour of quacks and clucks the voice of Nature makes itself heard. And the implications of Nature’s speech [617–37, 659–65: 317, 318], which, because it is given to Nature, I take to represent Chaucer’s own opinion, are that all arguments advanced are equally acute and equally irrelevant. Every speech, aquiline or anserine, is simply a priori moralizing: everyone has theories about what ought to be done, but no one seems to care about what is actually going to be done. The creator of Criseyde and the Wife of Bath delicately points out, through the words of the goddess who bore them, that the basis of this whole verbose structure of special pleading is the actual living female in front of them [621, 626–7: 317], whom they seem not to notice. What does she think about it?
All the birds are equally discomfited by this, but there is still time to save the face of the love convention when the lady makes her choice. But now comes the crowning touch of the whole uproarious farce: the lady calmly refuses to make any choice [652: 317]. The noise has all been made for nothing, and Chaucer has learned nothing from his dream about the subtleties of love etiquette except that they do not seem to work.
Then there is the little skit called Anelida and Arcite, which need not concern us long. The lady, Anelida, loves Arcite with all the fervent devotion required of her by courtly love: she gives him her whole soul. A modern writer would see that love of this sort is really a disguised masochism and that to adopt this attitude toward one’s lover gives one a far subtler hold on him than any other approach could possibly do. A modern writer on this assumption would handle the situation exactly as Chaucer handles it. The man gets restive and deserts his affectionate lady for another one who makes him step lively. The long lament of the deserted Arcite follows [211–341: 306–7], tripping and bouncing along in almost every metre known to English poetry: she is obviously getting as much fun out of her desertion as she ever did out of her love affair.24 She goes to the temple and is just about to begin another long complaint when the poem ends.
There are many Chaucerian critics who take nominalism, the belief that individuals are real, so much for granted that they are often not aware that another way of looking at things existed in Chaucer’s time. And the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women is an excellent instance of how such critics can go wrong in reading Chaucer. The daisy turns out to be, not an orthodox Wordsworthian daisy recollected in tranquillity, but the emblem of a marguerite cult, and the passage celebrating it a mosaic of literary reminiscences. As a matter of fact this poem remains within the medieval love vision convention. It is a brilliant treatment of realistic symbolism (in the medieval sense of the word realistic) and constitutes a palinode in form as well as in content.
The daisy is introduced on the morning of the first of May, which means that it is a symbol, first of all, of the awakening of spring and the resurrection of life. The accretion of symbols around an object makes symbolic development a process of expansion, and the growth and unfolding of the flower is peculiarly appropriate to this. So the daisy is primarily the harbinger of an awakening world:
And doun on knes anoon-ryght I me sette,
And, as I koude, this fresshe flour I greete, …
Forgeten hadde the erthe his pore estat
Of wynter, that hym naked made and mat.25
But the daisy is much more. It is the harbinger also of the awakening day; it is an emblem of light, and with its white-rayed petals and its golden core it looks like a kind of microcosm of the sun. The daisy, says Chaucer, is the “day’s eye”: it opens to greet the sun in the morning and closes up at night, hating darkness [43–63: 483]. That is one aspect of the daisy. Then again, it is white, and white is the colour of purity and chastity, or red, which is the colour of passion. Thus, the daisy becomes a little goddess in her shrine of grass: Chaucer, in one of the supremely exquisite passages of English—surely of any—poetry, gets on his knees to her. He addresses her earlier as:
of alle floures flour,
Fulfilled of al vertu and honour. [53–4: 483]
Now symbolism is the relating of outward objects to inner experience, and even though Chaucer is ready to say of the daisy that:
She is the clernesse and the verray lyght
That in this derke world me wynt and ledeth. [84–5: 484]
still, as a symbol expands, there eventually comes a stage at which it has to be humanized. So the expansion of the symbolic daisy reaches its limit when the two qualities which the daisy possesses, light and virtue, appear in personal form, just as a vision of gods follows immediately the initiate’s understanding of the symbolism of his rite. Chaucer takes advantage of a fact he has previously mentioned, that the daisy, being a flower of the sun, closes up at night, and with darkness the little emblem of light, “fulfilled of al vertu and honour,” disappears, and the god of love enters in the form of a sun-god, with Alceste by his side [212–46: 487]. The one is associated with the passionate red and the other with the pure white of the daisy. In an initiation the epiphany is usually followed by a hymn of praise, and Chaucer’s ballade appropriately follows their entry, enlarging the symbolism still further [249–69: 488]. He has already made the daisy the quintessential flower (which is what “of floures flour” means), less a flower than an incarnation of “flowerness.” Now, when the virtue and honour of the daisy develop into the virtuous and honourable Alceste, she too is the quintessence of beauty, the ballade being a catalogue of the famous beauties she transcends. Chaucer takes pains to make it clear that Alceste is simply the soul of the daisy in anthropomorphic form:
For of o perle fyn, oriental,
Hire white coroune was ymaked al;
For which the white coroune above the grene
Made hire lyk a daysie for to sene. [221–4: 487]
The English word “daisy” (day’s eye) refers only to the solar part of the symbolism: but the word “marguerite,” which would be equally prominent in Chaucer’s mind, is derived from the Greek word for pearl, which links it up with the “vertu and honour” part, as the pearl is, because of its colour, shape and delicacy, also an obvious symbol of pure woman-hood.
With the entry of the gods the poem begins to take on the theological tone of the court of love. The first appearance of the God of Love almost recalls the triumphant Christ of the Apocalypse, and the long dialogue between the two divinities [341–534: 491–5] recalls those Italian primitives in which a precocious little manikin, with the piercing and accusing eyes of insulted godhead, is held in restraint by a gentle and kindly Madonna. We are, therefore, not surprised at the theological nature of the scheme projected: a martyrology of Cupid’s saints.
Everything is demurely consistent with medieval philosophy and with its organizing principle that the individual is less real than his state of mind. If Chaucer the individual were the final reality, he could write a legend of good women whenever he wanted to. But Troilus and Criseyde and the translated Romaunt of the Rose were the products of a contrary state of mind, and that state has first to disappear and be replaced by its opposite. It can easily be seen how closely this doctrine is connected with the idea of purgatory, and the Prologue, as I hope I have made clear by this time, is a genuine initiation poem, initiation being always purgatorial. Love, the supremely integrating and unifying power in life, can be treated only in its pure state, and in that state it is, as Swedenborg was to say later, to the spiritual world what the sun is to the physical world: the source of its life.26 In the daisy the light and the purity of love are symbolically connected, and the daisy is a flower of the spring, appearing when the world regains its youth and energy. By seeing the daisy, Chaucer is enabled to see the two divinities who embody its two symbolic attributes; then his own soul goes through a similar integration, and so, by that process of expansion, association, and synthesis which was perhaps the finest achievement of the medieval mind, we pass insensibly from the little meadow daisy to the ambition to write The Legend of Good Women. And when we get to the end we discover that the beginning was not as accidental or as haphazard as it looks. But medieval philosophy was much greater in conception than in application, and so is The Legend of Good Women greater in prologue than in illustration. We, therefore, stop where the interest of the poem largely stops.
Except for the fact that most epics are longer, Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem. It is a complete artistic synthesis of life, containing all the religious, philosophical, social, and scientific ideas its author could pack into it. It is addressed, not only to “yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,” but to the moralist Gower and the philosopher Strode [5.1835, 1856–7: 479]. In this poem Chaucer said essentially all that he had to say, and it is the unity of what he said, or the “argument” of the poem in the broad sense, that I wish to consider.
The unity of a poem is primarily connected with form, and in form Troilus and Criseyde is a tragedy, as is clearly stated by Chaucer in his envoy:
Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye. [5.1786: 479]
We have a comparatively simple idea to start with, therefore, as tragedy in the Middle Ages was less a form than a formula, which is enunciated by the Monk in the Canterbury Tales:
Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie
As olde bookes maken us memorie,
Of hym that stood in great prosperitee,
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.27
However seriously Chaucer may have taken this, the fall of a hero from a high place to a low one is clearly the underlying pattern of Troilus and Criseyde:
The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,
That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye,
In lovynge, how his aventures fellen
Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie. [1.1–4: 389]
Now the first thing to notice about this medieval conception of tragedy is that it is not in any way a tragedy of character. It is true that in a good many cases medieval writers would give the fall of the hero a moral interpretation: he fell because he had done those things which he ought not to have done. But this is by no means invariably true, and even when it is, the sins are powerfully suggested by the environment of the high place. The fall of a given individual may not have been inevitable, but the fall of a certain number of individuals is inevitable; and, therefore, the fall, when it occurs, is automatic. The tragedy of Hamlet could not have happened to Othello, nor could the tragedy of Othello have happened to Hamlet, but the whole point about the medieval tragedy is that it could happen to anyone in a certain situation and always happens to someone. But, of course, tragedy is not the whole of life: there are rises as well as falls occurring continually, and these are also automatic. The obvious symbol for the entire operation of circumstance is, of course, the wheel, and the turning of the wheel of fortune appears in medieval art as well as in medieval history. Everyone is familiar with the drawings of it with men struggling up on the left, looking more and more secure and confident as they reach the top, gradually losing their balance on the right, and at the bottom either clinging desperately or falling out of the picture. One can see that wheel turning through the monotonous drone of the Monk’s voice as hero after hero is brought down until he loses his grip and disappears. And in Troilus and Criseyde the rotary motion is even more explicitly indicated at the beginning:
Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie. [1.4: 389]
Troilus gets a faint glimpse of the wheel when he is still far enough away from it to see it:
For wel fynde I that Fortune is my fo;
Ne all the men that riden konne or go
May of hire cruel whiel the harm withstonde. [1.837–9: 398]
He is caught, however, in one swift movement: he falls in love with Criseyde at first sight, and then for two books the wheel inches slowly up and up, through all the despair and nervousness of Troilus, through all the doubts and hesitations of Criseyde, through all the subtle strategy of Pandarus, to the consummation of the first night the lovers spend together. Then the wheel begins relentlessly to lower:
And whan a wight is from hire whiel ythrowe,
Then laugheth she, and makyth hym the mowe. [4.6–7: 441]
Inch by inch, as Troilus waits, first days, then hours, for his Criseyde, until he is again forced to realize, this time in deadly earnest, the existence of the wheel:
O ye loveris, that heigh upon the whiel
Ben set of Fortune, in good aventure,
God leve that ye fynde ay love of stiel,
And longe mote youre lif in joie endure! [4.323–4: 444]
In Dante, lovers like Troilus and Criseyde, even when happy in this life, are whirled eternally in hell, but Troilus suffers before death the agony of being broken forever on a wheel:
To bedde he goth, and walweth ther and torneth,
In furie, as doth he Ixion in helle. [5.211–12: 461]
But before the wheel has caught Troilus it has caught Troy:
And eft the Grekes founden nothing softe
The folk of Troie; and thus Fortune on lofte,
And under eft, gan hem to whielen bothe
Aftir hir cours, ay whil that thei were wrothe. [1.137–40: 391]
Therefore, Troilus, as a Trojan warrior, is condemned to death before the story opens, as Diomede calmly informs Criseyde. It is a “double sorwe” in more than one sense that Chaucer has to tell: the tragedy of Troilus is not exhausted by the infidelity of Criseyde, a fact which is of the highest importance for our understanding of the poem. Behind the fortune of Troilus is the fortune of his city, his friends, and his relatives; so that the wheel, as we look at it, expands until we realize that it is not a wheel of fortune, in the sense of being chance or haphazard, but the spinning wheel of the Fates:
And Troilus shal dwellen forth in pyne
Til Lachesis his thred no lenger twyne. [5.6–7: 459]
Fatalism in philosophy is generally an inference from a mechanical or materialistic science, and of no age is that more true than of Chaucer’s. To take one very concrete example: the medieval interpretation of love at first sight. A material substance leaves the eyes of Criseyde and enters those of Troilus: his love is no more romantic than getting shot with a bullet. But that is only one illustration of a universal principle. Everything in the world, organic or inorganic, is based on four aspects of existence, hot, cold, moist, and dry. The four possible combinations of these give us in the inorganic world the four elements; in the organic world, the four humours. Everyone is born with four humours, and their interrelation in any man determines what he is pleased to call his character. But the elements which compose everything in the world constitute only that part of the universe in which we live. Beyond us are the sun, moon, and stars, and these are made out of substances which are, by the process of special pleading in aesthetic metaphors dear to the medieval mind, “superior” to the elements, and therefore—for if you can bring in aesthetic metaphors you can bring in political ones—must necessarily “rule” them. We look at our flat, two-dimensional world, and in the process of historical events see the shape of a turning wheel. We look up to the heavens, and see that there is no wheel, but spheres which continually mould all earthly events to the forms of their involutions. This way of looking at the world stems very largely, of course, from Boethius, who gave the Middle Ages the idea of the wheel of fortune, and Boethius’s ideas and reflections concerning the ups and downs of fate have been closely woven into the poem. Every point of the tragedy of Troilus and Criseyde is, therefore, marked by the passage of the sun or moon through the zodiac, and at every point we are aware that the fall of Troy is not the result of the anger of gods, but of the movement of planets the unhappy pagans thought were also gods and hoped to propitiate by prayers and sacrifices. At the height of his ecstasy Troilus prays to Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Phoebus, Mercury, and Diana to help him in his love because, he thinks, they too have once loved, and will know how he feels [3705–35: 428–9]. The Christian who reads Chaucer’s poem knows that these alleged gods are only stars: they have never lived or loved and could not help Troilus even if they could hear him. An important symbol of the poem is, therefore, the stars hidden by clouds, with the inferred figure of the tempest which drives its victims to destruction. When Criseyde is first seen in her black cloak, there was never seen “under cloude blak so bright a sterre” [1.75: 391]. The tempest rises at the opening of book two:
Owt of thise blake wawes for to saylle,
O wynd, o wynd, the weder gynneth clere;
For in this see the boot hath swych travaylle
Of my connyng, that unneth I it steere. [2.1–4: 401]
The book rounds off with the tempest or “kankedort” in the breast of Troilus [2.752: 420]. The fatal conjunction of stars which occurs every six hundred years is concealed by rain.28 In the final catastrophe Troilus is hurled toward Charybdis, in which the tempest and wheel symbols coincide [5.638–44: 466].
Now whether there is any possibility of escaping this wheel or not, there is no doubt that there is an intense desire to escape from it. Many methods have been tried, many others recommended, with deliverance guaranteed. The most obvious is death. As soon as Troilus is caught by the wheel he longs for death, as under the court of love code he was expected to do. After he feels the full horror of his situation, he longs for death in good earnest, in one of the most poignant utterances of the poem:
O wery gooste, that errest to and fro,
Why nyltow fleen out of the wofulleste
Body that evere myghte on grounde go?
O soule, lurkynge in this wo, unneste,
Fle forth out of myn herte, and lat it breste. [4.302–6: 444]
The next step is to take matters into his own hands, kill himself and Criseyde, and cut himself loose from the wheel for good [4.1184–90: 453–4]. He draws his sword on his fainting mistress, but she revives, “and gan for fere crye” [4.225: 454], and Troilus is unable to go through with it. Suicide, then, is not a successful way out: the stars are too strong, and no man can die until the hour they have decreed. But the feeling of the immense relief of the escape through becoming dead or unconscious continues to haunt the poem. This is I think one reason for the numerous references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the stories of lovers released from suffering. The fatal day on which Pandarus commences operations is announced by the swallow who is the changed Procne; the owl who is the changed Ascalaphus shrieks for the blood of Troilus; the lark who is the changed Scylla sings on the morning of Criseyde’s tenth day of absence. Niobe is referred to in Troilus’s first expression of longing for death; Myrrha when the lovers weep in each other’s arms; Daphne and Herse in Troilus’s prayer.29
The escape through knowledge is also hinted at and provides us with one of the most dramatic openings in literature. At the very beginning of the poem Calchas, Criseyde’s father, divines the fortunes of the war, and deserts to the Greeks. I know of nothing more thrilling than Chaucer’s handling of this: he opens quietly with his “bidding prayer” for true lovers and raises the curtain on the besieged Troy. In the expectant hush that follows Calchas suddenly scurries across the stage, leaving Troy to its fate, Troilus to his tragedy, and his own daughter in the lurch, at least for the time being. Knowing that he is free makes us realize at once how irretrievably the others are caught, and it assuredly heightens the irony of the feast of the Palladion which follows it [1.160 ff.: 391]. It has a more concrete reference still, for Calchas being Criseyde’s father, his action suggests that “sliding courage” and a tendency to sacrifice loyalty to common sense run in the family, and so prepares the way for the escape of Criseyde herself, which we shall consider in a moment. And yet Calchas is a thoroughly contemptible character, the only one in the poem, which implies that one difficulty of escaping through knowledge is the one Faustus faced in a different way: gaining the world to lose one’s soul.
A much more attractive method of escape by knowledge is that taken by the great poet or artist. Although the artist escapes the wheel by being an observer rather than a sufferer, he records the processes of the stars, not to save his own skin, like Calchas, but to help and console others. The story of Troilus immortalized by a great poet is an example, not in the vulgar sense of a nurse’s bogey or a cautionary tale, but in the sense of an archetypal experience. The artist puts a pattern into the general chaos of life others may look to for guidance. The longer it lasts the more useful it will be. It is for this reason that Chaucer, who took such pains to revise and clarify his meaning in this poem, pleads with future ages to try to read him no matter how much the English language may change:
And for ther is so gret diversité
In Englissh and in writyng of our tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge,
And red wherso thow be, or elles songs,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche! [5.1793–8: 479]
But the artist’s pattern cannot last forever: sooner or later the larger rhythms of revolution whirl it away to oblivion, unless it is lucky enough to find, like the unknown and forgotten Lollius,30 someone to recreate it:
Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge,
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do. [2.22–6: 401]
At the end of the poem Chaucer asserts that the promise of escape offered by the Christian religion to its followers does succeed where all others fail. Now, as the poem is written for a Christian society, for it is addressed to Gower and Strode rather than to an audience who did not like it much anyway, according to the Legend of Good Women prologue, and as it is primarily concerned with the problem of the relation of man to his destiny, it is obvious that the claim of Christianity to possess the only true solution of that problem cannot possibly be ignored or even subordinated. There is, thus, no way of regarding Chaucer’s second envoy [5.1828–70: 479] as irrelevant to the poem, whether or not one agrees with him or believes in his sincerity. The tragedy of Troilus is the tragedy of the whole pagan world, as Chaucer is careful to point out:
Lo here, of payens corsed olde rites,
Lo here, what alle hire goddes may availle. [5.1849–50: 479]
Troilus believed in gods which had the power to deliver man from the working of fate, only to find that they do not exist. Since his time Christ has come, and he has that power. But how do we know that we are not deceiving ourselves just as Troilus did? The question is obviously so important for Chaucer’s Christian audience, for the only people who could possibly understand his poem were Christians, that, had he ignored it, one might be justified in drawing the inference that he believed the stars to be stronger than the god of England as well as the gods of Troy.
If, however, the mere contrast between B.C. and A.D. had exhausted the issue, the question whether or not Chaucer’s vindication of Christianity was a perfunctory gesture, made because it was the thing to do, would remain forever unsolved, as far as Troilus and Criseyde is concerned. But there is much more to it than that. The tragedy of Troilus is not solely a tragedy of paganism: the stars did not shift their courses or lose their influence at the Incarnation. Every six hundred years Jupiter and Saturn meet the crescent moon in Cancer and claim another victim.31 Every six hundred years some Chaucer has to discover some dusty and forgotten Lollius and retell his story. And any contemporary hearer or reader of Chaucer would understand that the astrological dating of the Troilus and Criseyde consummation carried the subsidiary meaning that what happened long ago will happen in this year of grace 1385. Therefore, Christianity does not have things all its own way: it is faced with the challenge of astrological fatalism and has to defend itself. It has to prove all other attempts to escape from the wheel of destiny wrong; then it has to prove itself right. It first, however, has to concern itself with something more vital than a dead and gone paganism: for the use of a contemporary date implies that Christianity has a contemporary rival. This contemporary rival is, of course, the court of love.
That the court of love definitely set itself up as a rival to Christianity is quite clear. It had its own God, its own theology, its own moral code, its own symbolism; and its adherents, in worshipping it, carried out an extensive parody of the Christian ritual which for consistent and extended blasphemy has had no parallel since. Chaucer appropriates all he needs of this. He opens with a “bidding prayer” addressed to the Love God’s devotees [1.15 ff.: 389]. When Troilus falls in love the process is described in terms of ecstatic religious conversion: Troilus goes on his knees before an angered deity to plead conviction of sin, to beg forgiveness, and to promise in future to lead a soberly adulterous and ungodly life. In fact, the omnipotence of the God of Love is manifest in his choice of victim:
In hym ne deyned spare blood roial
The fyr of love—the wherfro God me blesse—
Ne him forbar in no degree for al
His vertu or his excellent prowesse. [1.435–8: 394]
His worship, when Criseyde, after becoming converted to him, hears a nightingale singing a love song in her garden [2.18: 411], expands to a kind of pantheism. Pandarus piles the blasphemies up higher and higher: the saved of the God of Love are justified by their faith in him; Criseyde must forgive his strategy because Christ forgave his death, and so on till the climax is reached in the invocation to Venus at the opening of book three [1–49: 421], where love reaches its apotheosis as the sustainer and redeemer of the world: it has finally ousted divine love, the Holy Spirit, from its place. After that, we are hardly surprised to find that the opening of book 2 is taken from Dante’s description of the entrance to purgatory from hell, nor to find that the progression of Troilus from conversion to consummation is one from purgatory to heaven:
Thus sondry peynes bryngen folke to hevene, [3.1204: 434]
nor to find frequent references to his being in heaven scattered through this third book. A hymn of Dante’s to the Blessed Virgin is appropriated by the God of Love,32 and Boethius himself is called upon for homage.
Now the court of love promised, in the kind of love it recommended, deliverance from the wheel. And its kind of love attempted to combine the virtues, without the disadvantages, of the two ordinary forms of sexual union, marriage and the liaison. It forbade marriage, for it wanted to keep the ecstatic thrill of insecurity and it wanted to free the union of any taint of compulsion. On the other hand, it forbade the temporary liaison, for it wanted to keep the idea of sacramental fidelity and loyalty which the Church attaches to marriage. In other words, it tried, like art and religion, to create a pattern out of the chaos of life; and it found, in the rite of physical consummation, a continuous ecstasy of happiness. Like religion, it promised its followers ascent without descent: its true adherents, in the words of Pandarus, can no more come down on the other side of the wheel than the man can fall out of the moon [1.1023–6: 400]. It is also Pandarus who says that while a sinner may become a saint, it is very unlikely that a saint will later turn sinner [1.1002–8: 400].
It is one of the primary purposes of Troilus and Criseyde to expose the underlying fallacy of the court of love’s theology. It does not escape from circumstances, for its crucial rite, physical union, is based on desire, and desire is a creature of time and mutability.33 Very skilfully does Chaucer underscore the fact that the love of Troilus and Criseyde is essentially obedient to the law of kind, nature’s objective impulse toward reproduction which, though it exploits human desire, overrides human will and makes hash of human idealistic reasoning. And Chaucer, like a diabolist painter, calmly introduces that as part of his reason for doing homage to the God of Love:
Forthy ensample taketh of this man,
Ye wise, proude, and worthi folkes alle,
To scornen Love, which that so soone kan
The fredom of youre hertes to hym thralle;
For evere it was, and evere it shal byfalle,
That Love is he that alle thing may bynde,
For may no man fordon the la we of kynde. [1.232–8: 392]
And when Criseyde leaves Troilus, it is, in spite of all his religious phraseology, the absence of her body which is most vividly real to him:
Wher is myn owene lady, lief and deere?
Wher is hire white brest? wher is it, where?
Wher ben hire armes and hire eyen cleere,
That yesternyght this tyme with me were?
Now may I weepe allone many a teere,
And graspe aboute I may, but in this place,
Save a pilowe, I fynde naught t’enbrace. [5.218–24: 462]
Therefore, all attempts to make anything permanent or lasting out of a court of love attachment are quixotic. The operation of circumstances overrules it. Chaucer is not defending marriage, but if Troilus had married Criseyde he could have asserted the right to protect her, and would not have been forced to stand by helplessly when she was taken from him. Chaucer is not defending the liaison either, but had Troilus been the sort of man who could have profited by the example of Criseyde and the precept of Pandarus and taken another mistress, he might have suffered much less. Neither marriage nor the liaison are as ambitious as the court of love, but they go with the wheel: and, consequently, they make the best of a bad job, for escape from the wheel in that direction is impossible. The reason why Troilus suffers so at Criseyde’s infidelity is that he keeps the idea of a permanent pattern in life always in front of him: he looks at the whole problem spatially, and, of course, when Criseyde’s yielding to Diomede is compared with her professions of constancy to Troilus her action is abominable. But Criseyde does not see it in that way. She looks at it temporally: she yields to Troilus because she has yielded before and yields to Diomede because she has yielded to Troilus. When she swears fidelity to Troilus, she swears by symbols of constant inconstancy: the moon and a river [4.1545–54: 457]. She obeys the commands of a stronger force than the God of Love: and events work in her favour, not in that of Troilus. Troilus curses the day that follows his night of happiness with all the fervour of a Donne, [3.1450–70: 436–7], but the day comes for all that.
For Criseyde escapes. The fate of attractive women in a conquered city is not for her. She does not suffer too much to be consoled by another lover. We may not like Diomede as well as Troilus, but that is no reason to suppose that Criseyde did not. There is, thus, an additional significance in her swearing by the river Simois, for the river Simois, “that rennest ay downward to the se” [4.1549: 457], though unstable and sliding of courage, does escape from Troy. Now this fact of Criseyde’s escape is an integral part of Chaucer’s poem; and it is precisely this that makes the court of love moralists, and those later moralists like Henryson, who regarded the initial love of Troilus and Criseyde as essentially sacramental, like marriage, foam at the mouth.34 Criseyde ought not to have escaped. She ought to have been horribly punished. But that is only a pious hope, not a fact, and however energetically the moralists may affirm that she was punished, do they really know whether she was or not? Logically the moralists have to concede this point and say that although Troilus was faithful and suffered for it, and although Criseyde was unfaithful and got away with it, nevertheless Criseyde ought to have remained faithful and suffered, because it would be the decent thing to do. But why? What god would justify her fidelity? The moralist may refuse to believe in the wheel of fortune, but his argument symbolizes it, for it circles like a boomerang.
The conventional moralist, who holds that all sexual attachments outside marriage, if he makes even that exception, are immoral, is no better off. Naturally, the centre of his obloquy is less Criseyde than Pandarus. But it is difficult to make out a case on purely moral grounds, without reference to religion, against Pandarus; for Chaucer is careful to show that if there is one thing Pandarus is not, it is a pander. The amount of work he puts into his stratagems is done with complete disinterest: he gains nothing by it and wants only to bring about the supreme happiness of Troilus and Criseyde as he understands happiness. And when things go all wrong, there is no doubt about the sincerity of his sympathy or of his contempt for the Criseyde who has broken his code. He is a servant of love, but if one puts that aside and considers only the moral implications of his attitude, they are seen to be quite simple and impeccable. Whatever brings happiness and does harm to no one cannot be wrong. It would do harm to Criseyde were her intrigue known, so Troilus is solemnly adjured to keep it secret. And if the moralist sulkily retreats from morality to convention and asserts that what has to be kept secret must have something wrong about it, what support, still on strictly moral grounds, can he offer except to say that somehow or other the voice of the people, which establishes conventions, is the voice of God? Public opinion goes on record exactly twice in Troilus and Criseyde. It roars at the desertion of Calchas [1.85–91: 390], and it roars for the traitor An tenor [4.183–6: 443]. As it is disastrously wrong both times, a love affair which kept itself secret from such a mob might well congratulate itself.
No, there is little use trying to wax righteously indignant over either Criseyde or Pandarus. Pandarus is as fine a man as this world, by itself, can offer: he is no Mephistopheles. Pandarus is the creation of a serene poet interpreting a sane and healthy morality: Mephistopheles, who comes from the lower world to point out the delights of this one, and who has much of his author’s sympathy although he is an agent of evil, is the creation of a rebellious poet struggling with the warped and confused morality of the Renaissance. And if there is anything wrong with Criseyde’s desertion, there is surely something much more wrong with the whole train of events that suggested it. It is significant that Criseyde and Pandarus both despise what we call superstition: Criseyde is contemptuous of her father’s astrology [4.1401–14: 456]; Pandarus ridicules attempts to divine dreams [5.358–85, 1275–81: 463, 473]. They despise occult mysteries for the same reason that Edmund despises them:35 they are children of nature, concerned with the world, not the heavens. It is futile to condemn them: it is the world we must condemn. This is the crucial difference between a religious tragedy like Troilus and Criseyde and a moral tragedy like Romeo and Juliet. In Shakespeare there is lip-service to the same astrological fatalism: the lovers are “star-crossed.” But, nevertheless, our reaction is not purely fatalistic: we feel that in some way there has been a waste of two perfectly good lives. We feel like condemning the agents of the tragedy: if the Montagues and Capulets would stop their silly wrangles, young lovers would not be slaughtered. The prince who points this moral gets the last word. But in Chaucer the efficient causes of the catastrophe are less easy to locate. Again, the religious fatalism of Troilus and Criseyde is in sharp contrast to the atheistic fatalism of Hardy. In Hardy the machinery of fate is less intelligent and sensitive than the material it operates with: its most typical representatives, then, are projectiles of force and cunning rather than imagination, like Napoleon. The only escape from this unconscious power is through the increase of consciousness. Here the solution again is moral, though in a different way: the tragedy of Tess is also a waste, and had Angel been more intelligent, less subject to the automatic workings of instinct, the tragedy need not have happened.36 But in Chaucer the chief characters are of the highest possible intelligence: not only their hopes and desires, but all their prudence and caution, their rationalizings and their idealisms, are adjusted with the most hair-splitting delicacy to the movements of the stars. As we have already said, the escape from the wheel through increase of knowledge does not work either.
Troilus and Criseyde, then, is not a moral tragedy but the tragedy of morality: it chooses the finest this world can produce only to show how useless and bankrupt it is. Good works are of no avail without something higher—faith. But is there any positive element in this whole dreary mess of Pandarus’s miscalculations, Troilus’s agony, Criseyde’s infidelity, and the futility of all Trojan effort, which will lead us straight to the positive assurance which faith gives?
We can answer this by finding out what Chaucer is really interested in and, consequently, what he told the story for. He is not, like the moralists, like Henryson or even Boccaccio, primarily interested in Criseyde. He is usually considered to be sentimental about Criseyde, but what he says is:
Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Forther than the storye wol devyse, [5.1093–4: 471]
in which he implies that what really excuses Criseyde is not so much his tender heart as the formal requirements of his poem. It is Troilus who holds him, and it is the “double sorwe” of Troilus, of which Criseyde forms only part, that is his theme. Now the tragic love and death of Troilus is again, of course, more than the medieval fall of the illustrious man with a moral attached, for the last words of Troilus, chosen by Chaucer, I believe, with very great care, are as follows:
But trewely, Criseyde, swete may,
Whom I have ay with al my myght yserved.
That ye thus doon, I have it nat deserved. [5.1720–2: 478]
The undeserved suffering of a tragic hero brings us to the concept of sacrifice. And sacrifice, a completely nonmoral act in its essence, is bound up with faith in religion as opposed to the routine practice of morality.
The symbolism by which Chaucer indicates that Troilus is a sacrificial victim is very subtle and very unobtrusive, but it is there. As usual, it slips in under cover of professed adoration for the God of Love. The bidding prayer at the opening states with bland reverence that the purpose of the sacrifice is to establish communion among devout believers in Eros. It is only in the double meaning of two lines that we begin to suspect anything, and we need not suspect that if we do not wish to:
Thus biddeth God, for his benignite,
So graunte hem soone owt of this world to pace,
That ben despeired out of Loves grace. [1.40–1: 390]
Then the events begin to move, and the sun glides into the “white bull” [2.55: 402]. Taurus, of course, but why white? A thousand lines intervene, and then comes Troilus’s prayer to Jupiter, who loved Europa in the form of a white bull, to aid him in his love.37 Criseyde has to leave Troilus, and then comes:
Right as the wylde bole bygynneth sprynge,
Now her, now ther, idarted to the herte,
And of his deth roreth in compleynynge,
Right so gan he aboute the chaumbre sterte. [4.239–42: 443]
The white bull is an emblem of a perfect sacrifice, and it is very difficult to believe that these three interconnected passages are all accidents. But the bull is not only a sacrificial animal; it is a symbol of fertility, and the whole symbolism of sacrifice which through the death of one reintegrates and strengthens those who remain alive is connected with the death and rebirth of the year. And the rhythm of the dying and reviving year runs all through the tragedy of Troilus. Troilus is, as Chaucer takes pains to point out, the appropriate victim of such a sacrifice, the king’s son. He first meets Criseyde in April, at the feast of Palladion which bears a considerable resemblance to the festival in which we commemorate the year’s rebirth, Easter [1.155–61: 391]. Chaucer’s exquisite handling of the scene, too, recalls the immemorial nature myth of the sleeping beauty: among all the handsomely dressed women the most beautiful stands completely silent, dressed in the black of a widow’s cape [1.170: 391]. No wonder Troilus, as he gazes at her, unconsciously refers to the ladies who “slepeth softe” while their lovers have insomnia [1.195: 391]. In the next book we are in May, but it is still the awakening spring when the wheel begins its movement. Chaucer adds a scene to Boccaccio here: the hero who is to be sacrificed has to have his triumphant ride through the streets before it takes place; so Troilus, the conquering warrior, the flawless victim, rides directly under Criseyde’s window with the world temporarily at his feet [2.616 ff.: 408]. It is again May, or at any rate spring, when the consummation takes place, and the fertilizing rains pour all night.38 When the catastrophe has occurred, the emphasis is rather on the fertility god’s descent to the underworld:
But fro my soule shal Criseydes darte
Out nevere mo; but down with Prosperpyne,
Whan I am ded, I wol go wone in pyne. [4.472–4: 446]
Criseyde goes back to the black dress, and her departure is symbolized by the sterility of winter:
And as in wynter leves ben biraft,
Ech after other, til the tree be bare,
So that ther nys but bark and braunche ilaft,
Lith Troilus, byraft of ech welfare,
Ibounden in the blake bark of care. [4.225–9: 443]
The world wakes up again for the sacrifice as the final book opens in the spring, with Diomede pleading with Criseyde “fresshe as braunche in May” while Troilus gives orders for the imposing funeral pyre which is at the same time his own altar:
But of the fir and flaumbe funeral
In which my body brennen shal to glede,
And of the feste and pleyes palestral
At my vigile, I prey the, tak good hede. [5.302–5: 462]
Adonis, the greatest of all dying gods, was slain by a boar, and, of course, the boar is an emblem of the Diomede family: a good deal of space is taken up with Troilus’s dream of the fatal conquering boar and Cassandra’s interpretation of it [5.1233–1533: 472–6]. This is in Boccaccio, but it is Chaucer who ties it neatly into the general symbolism of the poem when he makes Troilus pray to Venus, greatest of all divinities according to his religion, for aid:
For love of hym thow lovedest in the shawe,
I meene Adoun, that with the boor was slawe. [3.720–1: 428]
There are even more Christian hints: in Criseyde’s absence Troilus spends three days in a condition of absolute despair, “and on the fourth day he began to mend,” and when he curses the gods responsible for his fate [5.207–8: 461], he brings in two gods quite arbitrarily and by accident not mentioned elsewhere in the poem, Ceres and Bacchus, gods of bread and wine [5.208: 461]. And there is one more curious fact. Most dying gods are associated with some deep red flower that is thought to spring from their blood, as Hyacinthus is associated with the “sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.”39 Troilus has no flower, but a recurrent symbol of his hopeless love is a ruby ring. Pandarus says to Criseyde, apropos of nothing in particular:
And, be ye wis as ye be fair to see,
Wel in the ryng than is the ruby set. [2.584–5: 408]
Then we learn that Troilus possesses a ruby ring: it glows for an instant as he seals his first letter to Criseyde [2.1086–8: 413]. And it was a ruby, which Chaucer expressly says was “lik an herte” [3.1371: 436], which Criseyde gave Troilus as a pledge. And when Troilus is finally forced to realize something of his position, he says:
O ryng, fro which the ruby is out falle,
O cause of wo, that cause hast ben of lisse! [5.549–50: 465]
All four references to the ruby are Chaucer’s additions, as, indeed, practically all of these fertility symbols are. For all this the inevitable appeal is, of course, to the “yonge fresshe folkes, he or she” at the end.
There is implicit in the tragedy of Troilus, then, the myth of the king’s son sacrificed in the role of the dying god. The symbols we have noted are only a selection from a large network of images, a few phallic, most merely connected with the growth and death of vegetation, like the famous “hazelwood” one,40 which form a pattern linking in at every point with movements, now precipitate, now hesitant, of the main characters, all slowly pushing the fatal wheel. But enough has been said to establish the main point. Now, the fatalism of Greek tragedy is a development of the sacrifice, and in it the suffering endurance of the hero is at once a statement and a solution of the problems that tragedy raises. So why should the sacrifice of Troilus point to the supersession of Greek by Christian religion? Or, to put it in another way, as Chaucer presumably knew nothing of Greek tragedy, why is Chaucer able to regard the Christian faith as anything beyond an expression of overwhelming fatalism?
The reason for this is to be found in another of those crucial stanzas at the close which we have not yet considered: Troilus’s laugh as he is freed from the world. For our admiration of the endurance of Troilus and our sympathy with his suffering has to be qualified by the fact that he gets very little chance to pose. He belongs to the comic carnival as well as to the tragic sacrifice. To kill himself and Criseyde in a mad fit of jealousy would give a rounded Sophoclean finish to the performance: Troilus sets about this, but Criseyde cries, and Troilus makes a mess of it. To go forth and wreak dire vengeance on Diomede would give it a fine Euripidean swing: Troilus tries this too, but although he batters and batters away at Diomede’s helmet, he makes no impression on it [5.1762: 478]. Besides, Troilus is his own chorus; he weeps and wails and groans over his real sufferings, and, on the principle that a hired mourner will make more noise than a sorrowing relative, weeps and groans still more over his conventional ones. Everything conspires to give the impression that in spite of his very real agony, in spite even of that heartbreaking wait, hour after hour, on the walls of Troy for the Criseyde who will never return, the sentimental, honest Troilus, as nervous in love as he is courageous in fighting, as shy a virgin as Criseyde is a sophisticated widow, is a figure of fun.
For with Troilus a new figure emerges from the fabliaux into serious English literature—the cuckold. It is true that the cuckold is married, but Troilus belongs to an age in which the court of love was vanishing and marriage was coming into its own as the normal form of sexual love. Later writers tended to think of Troilus and Criseyde as really married. When the cuckold comes in the door, the court of love, like Horace, jumps out the window. But the portents of his entry are more extensive than that. The cuckold is subjected to the subtlest humiliation a man can endure: he suffers, but his suffering is not dignified. In a comedy he is always pathetic, however much the dramatist may guy him—even Sir John Brute41 is a pathetic figure—but in a tragedy he is always ridiculous, however much the dramatist may sympathize with him. In Greek tragedy, the irony of fate is appreciated at second hand: the tragedy is a very real centre, the irony a remote and inhuman circumference. But the double sorrow of Troilus is a double-edged sorrow—there is another way of looking at it, in which the irony is the central thing and the tragedy peripheral. We can see this double focus, because we can look at it objectively; as soon as Troilus can look at himself objectively he laughs. But an enlightenment gained by someone after death may be achieved by someone else of a later age, who can take that objective view: we feel, for instance, that Troilus, secure in the sphere of the moon,42 is looking at his story very much as Shakespeare looked at it. Dante says that when he was on earth the universe appeared to be geocentric; but when he was in heaven he knew that there was the real centre. Troilus is similarly turned inside out. Now one step more leads us to the conclusion. Troilus in his life saw only tragedy because he, a man, was being sacrificed in the role of a god. But the tragedy was not the whole story: the sacrifice was ineffectual, which, though it is an ironic fact, implies a still more horrible tragedy. It is only by means of an effectual sacrifice, that is, the sacrifice of a god in a form of a man, that the release of laughter comes.
One of the most solemn moments in the St. Matthew Passion occurs during the tenor recitativo which tells of Peter’s denial and of his conviction by the crowing of the cock. And when the tenor comes to this, if he is any good, he does suddenly crow like a real rooster. A similar touch of supreme genius is in the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde. Through the memorial of the sacrifice, the elevation of the host, and the hymn to the Christ triumphant in the Trinity, there sounds the laughter of Troilus, which, to a modern reader, carries a faint suggestion of the raucous cackle of Thersites.43 Chaucer is the master of comedy, and could perhaps never have written the tragedy of Troilus had he not been able to balance everything on this laugh.
The ultimate solution is Catholic, of course, but it is a Catholicism arrived at by what is almost a Protestant route. The complete rejection not so much of the things of this world, for Chaucer is no ascetic, as of the entire machinery of the universe and the whole concept of a moral order, with the sacrifice of Christ and the faith in its effectiveness as the only things that make life intelligible: all this is at least as close to Calvin as to St. Thomas. It is another instance of the unity of culture that the fourteenth-century England, which had produced Wycliffe as its most representative thinker, should also produce Troilus and Criseyde as one of its most deeply considered and carefully thought-out works of art.