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L'Absent, The Absentee, it is impossible that a Parisian can make any sense of it from beginning to end. But these things teach authors what is merely local and temporary. Les deux Griseldis de Chaucer et Edgeworth; and, to crown all, two works surreptitiously printed in England under our name, and which are no better than they should be.
The fidelity of Griseldis under the trials imposed upon her by her, in point of fact, brutal husband is the fidelity of a martyr to unreason.
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.
Scene III. The Marquis, still in purple and gold, and red stockings and Hessian boots, says with some timidity and much grace, pointing to the magnificent clothes brought by his courtiers, "Would you mind, dear Grizel, putting on these clothes to please me?" But Griseldis is extremely modest.
The Marquis, after hunting deer on a steep little hill, shaded by elm trees, sees Griseldis going to a well, a pitcher on her head. He reins in his white horse, and cranes over in his red cloak, the young parti-coloured lords-in-waiting pressing forwards to see her, but only as much as politeness warrants. Scene II. A stubbly landscape.
Already, long ago, at the first call of Petrarch, Chaucer, by the side of the merely mediæval love types of brutish lust and doglike devotion of the Wife of Bath and of Griseldis, had rough-sketched a kind of modern love, the love which is to become that of Romeo and Hamlet, in his story of Palemon and Arcite.
He turns round to Griseldis, who is waiting at table, and bids her be a little more careful what she is about with those dishes. Scene III. Dumb show. Griseldis, in her black smock, is sweeping out the future Marchioness's chamber. Scene IV. At table. The Marquis suddenly bids Griseldis, who is waiting, come and sit by him; he kisses her, and points at the supposed bride and brother-in-law.
Nor does this vivacity find a less amusing expression in so trifling a touch as that in the "Clerk's Tale," where the domestic sent to deprive Griseldis of her boy becomes, eo ipso as it were, "this ugly sergeant."
He visited Genoa and the brilliant court of the Visconti at Milan; at Florence, where the memory of Dante, the "great master" whom he commemorates so reverently in his verse, was still living, he may have met Boccaccio; at Padua, like his own clerk of Oxenford, he possibly caught the story of Griseldis from the lips of Petrarca. It was these visits to Italy which gave us the Chaucer whom we know.
Learning is there in the portly person of the doctor of physic, rich with the profits of the pestilence the busy serjeant-of-law, "that ever seemed busier than he was" the hollow-cheeked clerk of Oxford with his love of books and short sharp sentences that disguise a latent tenderness which breaks out at last in the story of Griseldis.
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