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Now let us hear Chaucer with his single stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the murderous tread behind us: The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak. Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it Collins's noise or Chaucer's silence?
I think all of us who can read Chaucer in his own language must agree with these judges. But Dryden goes on to say he does not write for such, but for those who cannot read Chaucer's English.
The chief poems which Caxton printed were Chaucer's. In one place he calls Chaucer "The worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English." Here, I think, he shows that he was trying to follow the advice of "those honest and great clerks" who told him he should write "the most curious terms" that he could find. But certainly he admired Chaucer very greatly.
We find ourselves looking at the shiny bald head of Chaucer's Monk, at the lean horse and threadbare clothes of the Student of Oxford, at the brown complexion of the Shipman, at the enormous hat and large figure of the Wife of Bath, at the red face of the Summoner, at the hair of the Pardoner "yelow as wex." These are not mere figments of the imagination.
Like patient Griselda in Chaucer's poem, who did her spinning while she watched her sheep, "she would not have been idle till she slept." Ever since she learned at her mother's knee those early lessons in knitting, she has kept the needles flying. She can knit perfectly well now while she follows her flock about.
The reasons for Chaucer's attachment to this particular patron are probably not far to seek; on the precise nature of the relation between them it is useless to speculate.
That is the spirit of Chaucer's poetry; but alongside of it existed yet the ballad poetry of the people, wholly untouched by courtly elegance and classical pedantry; rude in art but never coarse, true to the backbone; instinct with indignation against wrong, and thereby expressing the hope that was in it; a protest of the poor against the rich, especially in those songs of the Foresters, which have been called the mediaeval epic of revolt; no more gloomy than the gentleman's poetry, yet cheerful from courage, and not content.
Among fully a hundred different volumes that he printed were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and an English translation of Vergil's AEneid. Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The greatest prose work of the fifteenth century was completed in 1470 by a man who styles himself Sir Thomas Malory, Knight.
The huge stature and startling scarlet face of the Sompnour is in just the same spirit as Shakespeare's skulls and motley; the same spirit gave Chaucer's miller bagpipes, and clad his doctor in crimson. It is the spirit which, while making many other things, loves to make a picture.
Chaucer translated this universal favorite, putting in some original English touches; but of the present Romaunt only the first seventeen hundred lines are believed to be Chaucer's own work.
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