CANTERBURY TALES, The. The Book of the Tales of Canterbury' has a per manent claim on the attention of reading men. It represents the most mature and the most variously brilliant achievement of the man whom the world will always regard, and in many respects rightly, as the father of English poetry. In its structure it is, though uncompleted, the happiest scheme of the many that have been devised for presenting a series of stories in a manner at once natural, dramatic and the re verse of monotonous. In its setting it intro duces us to an acquaintance on terms of in timacy with the society, high and low, of merry England's 14th century, an age of color, of contrasts and of essential liveliness. In its contents it offers an inviting approach, for most men probably the readiest, to the literature of the late Middle Ages, a realm of gold for all its dross, whose literary coin still bore, after its own peculiar fashion, some stamp of the antique Roman world and is still current in the world of beauty to-day.
The Canterbury Tales,' as we know it, is a collection of 24 stories, two of them unfinished and two, for dramatic reasons, interrupted and not continued. These stories are bound to gether in a scheme, only partly realized, by means of the words of host, Harry Bailey, toast-master of the occasion • by the talk of the pilgrims — the tellers of the tales — among themselves; and by occasional narrative and descriptive touches on the part of Chaucer, himself a pilgrim and reporter of the whole. Though some of the stories were composed earlier, the writing of many of them and the work of weaving them all into a garland seem to have been the chief literary activity of the last 15 years of the poet's life. For death found him with the work still unfinished.
The plan which the poet proposes at the be ginning is characteristically ambitious; char acteristically, again, it underwent modifications and adjustments as the work proceeded; this fact, together with the further rearrangements introduced by different copyists, makes it im possible always to speak with certainty of Chaucer's final intention. But enough of the structure emerges to give to the collection as a whole vastly more significance than any one story,, or all of them arranged in a manner not so original, could possibly possess. It is per fectly possible for a continental critic, steeped in the literatures of the Romance tongues, to assert that he finds little in the 'Tales) that is new to him. He might be understood, if he preferred, as most English readers would not, Boccaccio's version of the story of Palamon and Arcite to that which Chaucer puts in the mouth of the Knight. He might assure us with
some truth that the story of the patient Gri selda is a translation and nothing more of Petrarch's version of the story. And so he might go through the list, conceding, however, perhaps more readily than the English reader, the originality of Chaucer's adaptation of the fabliau type in the 'Miller's Tale,' The Reeve's Tale' and the like, being more capable of appreciating these things in the Chaucerian spirit than the English reader, who is troubled, as Chaucer's audience plainly was not, by the indecorous character of the material upon which such splendid narrative artistry is lavished.
But to proceed thus is to refuge the poet credit for much that he has tried to do. He has not assembled his company of nine and twenty—perhaps there were a couple of priests besides—merely to treat us to a portrait gal lery. High and low, every one, be it noted, succeeded in the life he had chosen, Knight, Squire, Monk, Prioress, on the one hand, Yeoman, Cook and Plowman on the other; rascals like the Friar, the Pardoner, the. Sum moner; professional men and tradesmen, and the never-forgotten Wife of Bath, all step before its, it is true, in the general prologue. Under the clear, encouraging eye of Chaucer they declare themselves for the folk they are, so that Dryden could see "'their humors, their features and their very dress, as dis tinctly as if [he] had supp'd with them at the Tabard at Southwark." If Chaucer had stopped here, if he had given us nothing beyond his prologue, he would still have written some thing more brilliant, more sympathetic than any thing that can be found in mediaeval literature before him, but nothing essentially different from, let us say, the 'Etats du monde' of many a French satirist. But Chaucer, fortunately, does not stop there. Having got his characters, he set out to order his material in terms of drama. Tale was to be adjusted nicely to teller; character was to play upon character; little personal hostilities, class prejudices, different individual reactions upon some general theme of discussion were to bring the successive stories naturally and dramatically into being, as the pilgrims took their leisurely way along the well-known road to the shrine of the martyred saint. There was to be a constant flow of narrative, washing pleasantly upon the alternate shores of fiction, grave or gay, and of the real life of his own time. This plan, as has been said, is imperfectly carried through. To have conceived it at all, however, and even in part to have given to it poetic expression is to have made a distinct and permanent contribution to the literature of the world.