The reader to-day, making his way through this ((God's plenty)) of stories, serious and trivial, dignified and the reverse, will find his pleasure in tracing out some of the threads of Chaucer's interests, which make up a strand capable of giving, in spite of imperfections, unity and significance to the whole. He will start easily with the 'ICnight's Tale,' noting its nice adaptation to its grave, gentle, its thoroughly chivalrous teller, and he may, if he like, pass from this sort of serious, quasi-historical romance to romance of Oriental character in the multiplied wonders of the 'Squire's Tale,' to Arthurian matter in the 'Wife of Bath's Tale,' and to Chaucer's gentle and searching ridicule of degenerate romance in his own (Tale of Sir Thopas.' But if he is wiser he will read the tales in their setting, interrupting with the drunken Miller the Host's well-laid plans and sharing with the Reeve his resulting indigna tion, noting in the stories of both the robustness of the characters and the richness of the social background. A like situation he will observe in the tales of the Friar and Summoner. With the (Physician's Tale)— and the experience will doubtless be repeated in the case of the tales of the Man of Law, the Shipmah and the Man ciple — he will miss the sense of delicate and inevitable adjustment; temporary assignments, stop-gaps, perhaps some of them were. But the (Pardoner's Tale' is one of the most effectively told of all, and his prologue an amazing and subtle piece of psychologizing. With it he will be interested to compare that other essay in the "literature of exposure") the tale of the Canon's Yeoman. 'The Monk's Tale' and the 'Parson's Tale' do not spring of sheer neces sity from the situation, but they are excellent in character, and because informing and edify ing, more delightful to contemporary readers than can nowadays be easily appreciated. And to the 'Monk's Tale' the humor of the Nun's Priest, set off with all the arts of a skillful preacher on a holiday, affords a perfect foil, Just as Chaucer's ponderous 'Melibceus) con trasts with the gaiety, imperfectly grasped by the host, of his own 'Sir No more delicate adjustment is to be found between tale and teller than in the (Prioress's Tale,' a story current all over Europe, but here enhanced in value by the artistic uses to which it is put.
Very much on Chaucer's mind, apparently, was the problem of what to do with a certain coarse, forth-putting type of woman whose de termination to carry things in her own high handed way was sure to make trouble for what ever member of the inferior sex she chanced to mate with. Harry Bailey has such a wife, and he has already confided some of his woes on this score to the pilgrims, when the presi dent of this sect of °arch-wives,° the very em bodiment of all their awful power, steps for ward in the person of the Wife of Bath, and in good scholastic style, with full illustration from her own experiences, states her case. Such a subject will not down, and it is the clerk who makes the story of Griselda serve the end of a savage, though delicately administered, satire upon the extravagant positions advanced by the Wife of Bath. At once the Merchant cuts
in with a hint of his own miseries in marriage and a story which makes clear his own theory of the bitter disillusion in store for those who trust their wives. It is possible that the 'Squire's which treats of love, some thing quite apart from marriage, according to the medimval view, might when finished have been brought into closer relation with what goes before. It is certain that it prompts the Franklin to tell his story presenting a husband, a wife, a clerk and a squire in such an amiable light, developing at the same time a theory of mutual forbearance and trust in marriage which is the finest flower of agentilesse.° One can, if one wishes, push on further and tag the (Second Nun's Tale' as presenting the ecclesias tical view of marriage as something inferior to celibacy.
But it would probably be wrong to do so or to insist that throughout the tales discussed, felt himself constrained to a rigid, doctrinaire discussion of marriage as a problem. He is concerned with the expression of human character in conduct, with the relations of man to his fellow men and women, and to God. Be ing of the Middle Ages he exhibits some of the conventions of the Middle Ages; the talk of his pilgrims unashamedly informs, it frankly edifies,. it indulges in class satire and sex satire, it inevitably finds itself revolving around tradi tional questions — how do rogues thrive in the world? how shall we make terms with fortune? how is man to succeed in civilizing woman? what is the nature of true gentility? It is impossible for Chaucer to look thought fully on human conduct without proceeding in this way to raise these questions. Human conduct, again, for him, as for his time, falls naturally into the elastic and all-embracing category of the seven deadly sins. But this does not mean that Chaucer is writing a tract on marriage or a book of exemplary anecdotes to illustrate the seven deadly sins. It is unlike him to attempt anything so rigidly schematic; certainly whatever his intention he achieved nothing of the sort; it was not for nothing that Dryden called him °a perpetual fountain of good sense?) It is this good sense of his which has led him to pierce through the conventions in which he inevitably worked to the plane of our common humanity on which all who love good literature can affectionately meet with him.
Consult Skeat, 'Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer) (7 vols., Oxford 1894), and 'Student's Chaucer' (complete text in one volume, Ox ford 1894); Hammond, Eleanor P., 'Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual' (New York 1908); Kittredge, G. L., 'Chaucer and His Poetry' (Cambridge 1915); Legouis, E., Chaucer (trans. by Lailevoix, London 1913) ; Tat lock and Mackaye, The Modern Reader's Chaucer) (New York 1914); Wells, John E., 'A Manual of Writings in Middle English' (New Haven 1916). •