We discuss Chaucer's own two tales, and the irony and humor in that he is the only pilgrim unable to tell a good story. There is something more here than a playful mockery of overly romantic and sentimental styles which were popular in Chaucer's day -- GK Chesterton points out that Chaucer is the creator of this whole world of Canterbury Tales; and, when the creator came unto his own creation, his own did not receive him.
We then also consider why the Canterbury Tales is the first novel - and why earlier works (like the Iliad or the Aeneid) are not novels.
(below, find a number of great quotes from GK Chesterton's book on Chaucer, which is available online at the Gutenberg Project)
Listen online [here]!
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GK Chesterton on Chaucer
Now even if we consider Chaucer only as a humorist, he was in
this very exact sense a great humorist. And by this I do not only mean a very
good humorist. I mean a humorist in the grand style; a humorist whose broad
outlook embraced the world as a whole, and saw even great humanity against a
background of greater things. This quality of grandeur in a joke is one which I
can only explain by an example. The example also illustrates that clinging
curse of all the criticism of Chaucer; the fact that while the poet is always
large and humorous, the critics are often small and serious. They not only get
hold of the wrong end of the stick, but of the diminishing end of the
telescope; and take in a detail when they should be taking in a design. The
Chaucerian irony is sometimes so large that it is too large to be seen. I know
no more striking example than the business of his own contribution to the tales
of the Canterbury Pilgrims. A thousand times have I heard men tell (as Chaucer
himself would put it) that the poet wrote The Rime of Sir Topas as a parody of
certain bad romantic verse of his own time. And the learned would be willing to
fill their notes with examples of this bad poetry, with the addition of not a
little bad prose. It is all very scholarly, and it is all perfectly true; but
it entirely misses the point. The joke is not that Chaucer is joking at bad
ballad-mongers; the joke is much larger than that. To see the scope of this
gigantic jest we must take in the whole position of the poet and the whole
conception of the poem.
The Poet is the Maker; he is the creator of a cosmos; and
Chaucer is the creator of the whole world of his creatures. He made the
pilgrimage; he made the pilgrims. He made all the tales that are told by the
pilgrims. Out of him is all the golden pageantry and chivalry of 'The Knight's
Tale;' all the rank and rowdy farce of the Miller's; he told through the mouth
of the Prioress the pathetic legend of the Child Martyr and through the mouth
of the Squire the wild, almost Arabian romance of Cambuscan. And he told them
all in sustained melodious verse, seldom so continuously prolonged in
literature; in a style that sings from start to finish. Then in due course, as
the poet is also a pilgrim among the other pilgrims, he is asked for his
contribution. He is at first struck dumb with embarrassment; and then suddenly
starts a gabble of the worst doggerel in the book. It is so bad that, after a
page or two of it, the tolerant innkeeper breaks in with the desperate protest
of one who can bear no more, in words that could be best translated as
'Gorlumme!' or 'This is a bit too thick!' The poet is shouted down by a
righteous revolt of his hearers, and can only defend himself by saying sadly
that this is the only poem he knows. Then, by way of a final climax or anticlimax
of the same satire, he solemnly proceeds to tell a rather dull story in prose.
Now a joke of that scale goes a great deal beyond the
particular point, or pointlessness, of The Rime of Sir Topas. Chaucer is
mocking not merely bad poets but good poets; the best poet he knows; 'the best
in this kind are but shadows'. Chaucer, having to represent himself as reciting
bad verse, did very probably take the opportunity of parodying somebody else's
bad verse. But the parody is not the point. The point is in the admirable irony
of the whole conception of the dumb or doggerel rhymer who is nevertheless the
author of all the other rhymes; nay, even the author of their authors. Among
all the types and trades, the coarse miller, the hard-fisted reeve, the clerk,
the cook, the shipman, the poet is the only man who knows no poetry. But the
irony is wider and even deeper than that. There is in it some hint of those
huge and abysmal ideas of which the poets are half-conscious when they write;
the primal and elemental ideas connected with the very nature of creation and
reality. It has in it something of the philosophy of a phenomenal world, and
all that was meant by those sages, by no means pessimists, who have said that
we are in a world of shadows. Chaucer has made a world of his own shadows, and,
when he is on a certain plane, finds himself equally shadowy. It has in it all
the mystery of the relation of the maker with things made. There falls on it
from afar even some dark ray of the irony of God, who was mocked when He
entered His own world, and killed when He came among His creatures.
---------------------------------
Nevertheless, there is another side; and an aspect in which
the pictures are extremely picturesque. It is a commonplace of the critics that
the actual stock of stories, which fill up the framework of The Canterbury
Tales, is a borrowed stock from all sorts of sources, like the plots of the
plays of Shakespeare. But the narrative poet had at least one opportunity of
showing dramatic talent which was denied to the dramatist. Shakespeare did not
have to offer each of his comedies as the creation of one of his characters. We
only know that Hamlet liked a particular play about Hecuba and that Theseus
could put up with a particular play about Pyramus and Thisbe. We are
unilluminated touching the theatrical tastes of King Lear or Macbeth. But
Chaucer had a collection of characters almost as diverse in dignity or
indignity, and had to select a story for each. The stories are chosen with
admirable art; with much more aptitude than some speeches in some dramas.
Nothing could be more fitting than the sustained nobility of 'The Knight's
Tale;' a tapestry of heroes clad in gold, except perhaps the ragged and rending
contrast that tears it at the end, when the Monk is just about to begin his
dignified recital of the deaths of kings, and the drunken Miller roars him down
with his cataract of coarse, not to say foul narrative; an admirably managed
collision of comedy; as if the ruffian had thrown a pail of slops over the
statelier story-teller. But other examples, which are less well known,
illustrate the same persistent neatness of impersonation. What could be more
apt than making the dignified anti-clerical Doctor careful to narrate, not a
Christian or even romantic story, but a story of the stoic virtue of heathen
Rome; the story of Virginius, precisely the sort of hero whom such secularists
have always preferred to the saint. How right it is that the chivalric romance
of the young Squire should differ from that of the old Knight, in having a
touch of the Arabian Nights about it; a more irresponsible and fabulous flight,
upon a winged horse, into the golden horizons of Tartary. Equally delicate is
the instinct which makes the Prioress, the refined and charming spinster, tell
the beautiful legend of the child singing down the street on his way to the
crown of martyrdom; or the Father Confessor of the nuns, a comfortable humorist
of the type rather common as the male adviser of devout females, tell a sort of
playful parable, full of nods and winks, in which the weaknesses of humanity
are courteously covered by the feathered costume of cocks and hens. It is more
generally recognized that the quarrel between the Summoner and the Friar is
vigorously illustrated in their respective narratives, and the same sort of
interplay of tales occurs in many places throughout the whole. Perhaps nothing
is more characteristic of the Wife of Bath's Tale than the enormous and
inordinate length of the Wife of Bath's Prologue. One is momentarily reminded
of the proportions between one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays and one of Mr.
Bernard Shaw's prefaces. Nobody will say that the Wife of Bath bears a marked
resemblance to Mr. Shaw; for of all the Pilgrims she was possibly the least
Puritan. But her glorious and garrulous egotism, her unfathomable and
inexhaustible vitality, are quite admirably hit off in the mere fact that she
talks about things in general at such interminable, if not intolerable length,
long before she gets to the beginning of her story at all. Chaucer, with his
typical shrewdness, has not supplied any such long personal preface to any of the
other stories. There are, of course, any number of other minor examples of the
same aptitude; indeed there are very few of the stories that are in themselves
entirely impersonal, or could have been shifted to any other person. It is not
for nothing that the comfortable and prosperous Merchant tells a tale that is
rather naughty, in the manner of a French farce, but not gross in the manner of
the Miller's Tale. I will not debate the case of the Cook's Tale, specially
called 'Gamelyn', because I know its authenticity is very doubtful. Finally,
there is the supreme example that I have already given, of the irony of the
Rhyme of Sir Topas. I mean the fact that the poet's own story is the only
unpoetical story. The tales are always appropriate; and the inappropriate is
the most appropriate of all. Chaucer has distributed caps to fit the heads of
the whole company; and when he reserves the dunce's cap for himself, it is all
the more fitting because it does not fit.
If, then, we regard the stories in a dramatic light, as
connected with the characters and quarrels of the storytellers, we can stretch
our minds to take in a general conception of the work which Chaucer was doing,
whether he knew he was doing it or not. The whole work takes on the character
of a Novel, the first true Novel in history. In it the fundamental logic of
most previous storytelling is already reversed. The story-tellers do not merely
exist to tell the stories; the stories exist to tell us something about the
story-tellers. The novel of character has appeared, and the novel of character
is something rather different even from the epic, let alone the allegory or
anecdote or story with a point. For though the great epic poets, Homer above
all, have sometimes a very strong sense of character, still their ultimate
motive is a true movement towards a crisis or an act; a turning-point of time
illustrative of the fate of man or the will of God. Homer has made a real
character of Hector, but the subject of the Iliad is not the character of
Hector, or even the life of Hector; it is the death of Hector, and the death of
Hector is the doom of Adam. It is quite different with that more modern form of
art for art's sake, which may be called character for character's sake. We
could not expect to have Hector talking for ever in his tent; as we should like
to have Falstaff talking for ever in his tavern. One could not go wandering
aimlessly with Orlando and Ruggiero as one could with Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, or with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. There would have to be a Quest of
some kind, that is, an ultimate epic action; the epic is always a chanson de
geste. And in the same way, nobody perhaps would have been more surprised than
Chaucer to be told that he had added or discovered something that is not to be
found in Virgil. Yet it is true that we might be interested in a Knight who
never got to Canterbury, as we could hardly be interested in a Trojan hero who
never got to Rome. In the novel of character, characters are companions; and
The Canterbury Tales is the grand original of all such works, because they
appear in companionship.
--------------------------------
It is not a question of the broad comedy or farce which is
most commonly mentioned by the critics, as in the unedifying quarrels of the
Summoner or the Miller. It is a thread of thoroughly sound and thoughtful
psychology that runs through almost all the interchanges, rather especially in
the passages that are comparatively quiet.
--------------------------------
And all this was done when the world had never so much as
dreamed of a novel, in the modern sense of a mere study of the fine shades of
fictitious character. This was done in an age of rigid religious allegories, of
flat and decorative romances of chivalry, of stories having indeed a hundred
merits of harmonious pattern or verbal melody, of spiritual idealism or
intellectual symbolism; but hardly as yet even the beginnings of what we now
call the psychological element in narrative. Chaucer did it alone; he did it
almost by accident; he did it by sheer moral imagination, in a style of which
there were as yet no models to emulate and no rules even to break. It was like
the first portrait drawn in a world that had known nothing but patterns.
Beautiful patterns indeed, and ingenious and intellectual patterns, and
patterns showing a profound knowledge of mathematics and their relation to
metaphysics; but with never a line or a curve in them calculated to teach
anybody how to begin the particular picture of a face. It may be said that this
is too sweeping a description of the world of literature to which Chaucer had
access, and so in a sense it is; but it will be found, I think, that the
exceptions really prove the rule. Dante, for instance, most certainly had a profound
sense of a human character, in the deeper sense of a human soul. I think it
probable that it was this sense of individuality in Dante that so profoundly
attracted Chaucer; and made Chaucer, with an insight remarkable at the time,
prefer the bitter exile of Ravenna to the resplendent Laureate of Rome. But
even the case of Dante does not meet the particular point I mean. The reason is
not merely that Dante could not, by the very nature of his work and plan,
develop the delicate and light comedy in consideration here. Nobody would
expect to find the joke about the Franklin and the Squire cheerfully introduced
into the Circle of Ice or mentioned in passing by St. Bernard when discoursing
on the Beatific Vision. But the reason is deeper than that. It is the reason
given, with great insight and wisdom, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, when he said that
tragedy swamps character while comedy consists in character. Dante deals with
those huge and heroic passions which are simply human or superhuman; but in any
case overwhelm the small differentiations that make all the fun of comic
fiction. The Franklin is essentially one particular father grumbling over one
particular son, in one particular set of highly amusing social circumstances.
But the cry of the father in Dante, as it comes out of the Tower of Hunger, is
simply the cry of fatherhood. I am not claiming for Chaucer the very highest
power of tragic or typical expression, which is not so much the voice of men as
of man. But I do claim for him that his comedy of character was of the finest;
but above all, that it was the first.
---------------------------------
The truth is that the broad religion creates the narrow
clique. It is what is called the religion of dogmas, that is of facts (or
alleged facts), that creates a broader brotherhood and brings men of all kinds
together. This is called a paradox; but it will be obvious to anyone who
considers the nature of a fact. All men share in a fact, if they believe it to
be a fact. Only a few men commonly share a feeling, when it is only a feeling.
If there is a deep and delicate and intangible feeling, detached from all
statements, but reaching to a wordless worship of beauty, wafted in a sweet
savour from the woods of Kent or the spires of Canterbury, then we may be
tolerably certain that the Miller will not have it. The Miller can only become
the Pilgrim, if he recognizes that God is in the heavens as he recognizes that
the sun is in the sky. If he does recognize it, he can share the dogma just as
he can share the daylight. But he cannot be expected to share all the shades of
fine intellectual mysticism that might exist in the mind of the Prioress or the
Parson. I can understand that argument being turned in an anti-democratic as
well as an anti-dogmatic direction; but anyhow the individualistic mystics must
either do without the mysticism or do without the Miller. To some refined
persons the loss of the latter would be no very insupportable laceration of the
feelings. But I am not a refined person and I am not merely thinking about
feelings. I am even so antiquated as to be thinking about rights; about the
rights of men, which are extended even to millers. Among those rights is a
certain rough working respect and consideration, which is at the basis of
comradeship. And I say that if the comradeship is to include the Miller at all,
it must be based on the recognition of something as really true, and not merely
as ideally beautiful. It is easy to imagine the Knight and the Prioress riding
to Canterbury and talking in the most elegant and cultivated strain, exchanging
graceful fictions about knights and ladies for equally graceful legends about
virgins and saints. But that sort of sympathy, especially when it reaches the
point of subtlety, is not a way of uniting, or even collecting, all the
Canterbury Pilgrims. The Knight and the Prioress would be the founders of a
clique; as they probably were already the representatives of a class. I am not
concerned here with whether the modern mind prefers its pretensions to popular
breadth or its claims to creedless spirituality. I am only pointing out that it
cannot have both at once; that if religion is an intuition, it must be an
individual intuition and not a social institution; and that it is much easier
to build a social institution on something that is regarded as a solid fact.
Now, however strange it may seem, the men of the Middle Ages did regard the
miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and the help given them from heaven by
his intercession 'when that they were sick', as examples of a solid fact. There
was any amount of human historical evidence for such miracles; and they were too
ignorant and primitive to have learnt to prefer determinist theory to
historical evidence. And as all men desire health, and as even the worst men
may ask heaven for help in ill-health, and as few except the very worst would
refuse altogether to be thankful for being healthy, the whole purpose and
attitude of the Pilgrimage rested on a reality recognized by all sorts of
people, good, bad and indifferent. A religion of miracles turned all this crowd
of incongruous people into one company. A religion of moods would never have
brought them together at the tavern, far less sent them trotting laboriously to
the tomb.
That is perhaps the deepest difference between medieval and
modern life, and the difference is so great that many never imagine it, because
it is impossible to describe it. We may even say that the modern world is more
religious, in that the religious are more religious. Anyhow, there is nothing
to prevent a modern mystic being as mystical as St. John of the Cross; and
doubtless many students of St. John of the Cross are even now approaching his
sanctity. But we may be practically certain that if there is a modern man like
the Miller or the Reeve, he has not got any religion at all. He certainly would
not go on a religious pilgrimage, or perform any religious duty at all. One of
the quarrels in The Canterbury Tales sounds exactly like a quarrel in a public-house
to-day, between a boisterous bookie and a surly north-country groom. It is
still possible to find two such persons in a public-house; it might be possible
to find them in a public conveyance going down to the Derby. But how are we to
stretch our minds so as to imagine the bookie and the groom deliberately going
together to Glastonbury, solely to inquire into the recent psychic phenomena
supposed (by some) to be connected with the Holy Grail? That is the measure of
the difference between Chaucer's age and our own. That is the measure of the
difference between an objective religion, worshipped as an object by the whole
people, and a subjective religion, studied as a subject only by the religious.
There is something much more dramatic and challenging than the disagreement of
the Summoner and the Friar: and that is the agreement of the Summoner and the
Friar. They would never even have come together to quarrel, except in a social
system that fundamentally assumed them to agree.
Thus, the Canterbury Pilgrimage takes on a very symbolic
social character, and is indeed the progress which emerged out of the medieval
into the modern world. All modern critics can take pleasure in the almost
modern realism of the portraiture; in the variety of the types and the vigour
of the quarrels. But the modern problem is more and more the problem of keeping
the company together at all; and the company was kept together because it was
going to Canterbury.
