The "Miller" "tells his churlish tale in his manner," of which manner the less said the better; while in the "Reeve's Tale," Chaucer even, after the manner of a comic dramatist, gives his Northern undergraduate a vulgar ungrammatical phraseology, probably designedly, since the poet was himself a "Southern man." The "Pardoner" is exuberant in his sample-eloquence;the "Doctor of Physic" is gravely and sententiously moral----a proper man, And like a prelate, by Saint Runyan, says the "Host." Most sustained of all, though he tells no tale, is, from the nature of the case, the character of Harry Bailly, the host of the Tabard, himself--who, whatever resemblance he may bear to his actual original, is the anecestor of a long line of descendants, including mine Host of the Garter in the "Merry Wives of Windsor." He is a thorough worldling, to whom anything smacking of the precisian in morals is as offensive as anything of a Romantic tone in literature; he smells a Lollard without fail, and turns up his nose at an old-fashioned ballad or a string of tragic instances as out of date or tedious. In short, he speaks his mind and that of other more timid people at the same time, and is one of those sinners whom everybody both likes and respects. "Iadvise," says the "Pardoner," with polite impudence (when inviting the company to become purchasers of the holy wares which he has for sale), that --our host, he shall begin, For he is most enveloped in sin.
He is thus both an admirable picture in himself, and an admirable foil to those characters which are most unlike him--above all to the "Parson" and the "Clerk of Oxford," the representatives of religion and learning.
As to the "Tales" themselves, Chaucer beyond a doubt meant their style and tone to be above all things POPULAR. This is one of the causes accounting for the favour shown to the work,--a favour attested, so far as earlier times are concerned, by the vast number of manuscripts existing of it.
The "Host" is, so to speak, charged with the constant injunction of this cardinal principle of popularity as to both theme and style. "Tell us,"he coolly demands of the most learned and sedate of all his fellow-travellers, --some merry thing of adventures;Your termes, your colours, and your figures, Keep them in store, till so be ye indite High style, as when that men to kinges write;Speak ye so plain at this time, we you pray, That we may understande that ye say.
And the "Clerk" follows the spirit of the injunction both by omitting, as impertinent, a proeme in which his original, Petrarch, gives a great deal of valuable, but not in its connexion interesting, geographical information, and by adding a facetious moral to what he calls the "unrestful matter" of his story. Even the "Squire," though, after the manner of young men, far more than his elders addicted to the grand style, and accordingly specially praised for his eloquence by the simple "Franklin," prefers to reduce to its plain meaning the courtly speech of the Knight of the Brazen Steed. In connexion with what was said above, it is observable that each of the "Tales" in subject suits its narrator. Not by chance is the all-but-Quixotic romance of "Palamon and Arcite," taken by Chaucer from Boccaccio's "Teseide," related by the "Knight"; not by chance does the "Clerk," following Petrarch's Latin version of a story related by the same author, tell the even more improbable, but, in the plainness of its moral, infinitely more fructuous tale of patient Griseldis. How well the "Second Nun" is fitted with a legend which carries us back a few centuries into the atmosphere of Hrosvitha's comedies, and suggests with the utmost verisimilitude the nature of a Nun's lucubrations on the subject of marriage. It is impossible to go through the whole list of the "Tales"; but all may be truly said to be in keeping with the characters and manners (often equally indifferent) of their tellers--down to that of the "Nun's Priest," which, brimful of humour as it is, has just the mild naughtiness about it which comes so drolly from a spiritual director in his worldlier hour.
Not a single one of these "Tales" can with any show of reason be ascribed to Chaucer's own invention. French literature--chiefly though not solely that of fabliaux--doubtless supplied the larger share of his materials;but that here also his debts to Italian literature, and to Boccaccio in particular, are considerable, seems hardly to admit of denial. But while Chaucer freely borrowed from foreign models, he had long passed beyond the stage of translating without assimilating. It would be rash to assume that where he altered he invariably improved. His was not the unerring eye which, like Shakspere's in his dramatic transfusions of Plutarch, missed no particle of the gold mingled with the baser metal, but rejected the dross with sovereign certainty. In dealing with Italian originals more especially, he sometimes altered for the worse, and sometimes for the better; but he was never a mere slavish translator. So in the "Knight's Tale" he may be held in some points to have deviated disadvantageously from his original; but, on the other hand, in the "Clerk's Tale," he inserts a passage on the fidelity of women, and another on the instability of the multitude, besides adding a touch of nature irresistibly pathetic in the exclamation of the faithful wife, tried beyond her power of concealing the emotion within her:
O gracious God! how gentle and how kind Ye seemed by your speech and your visage The day that maked was our marriage.
