rs
in all her pomp rather than the Virgilian queen. Jupiter's eagle, the
poet's guide and instructor in the allegory of the "House of Fame,"
invokes "Saint Mary, Saint James," and "Saint Clare" all at once; and
the pair of lovers at Troy sign their letters "la vostre T." and la
vostre C." Anachronisms of this kind (of the danger of which, by the
way, to judge from a passage in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good
Women," Chaucer would not appear to have been wholly unconscious) are
intrinsically of very slight importance. But the morality of Chaucer's
narratives is at times the artificial and overstrained morality of the
Middle Ages, which, as it were, clutches hold of a single idea to the
exclusion of all others--a morality which, when carried to its extreme
consequences, makes monomaniacs as well as martyrs, in both of which
species, occasionally perhaps combined in the same persons, the Middle
Ages abound. 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. The story was afterwards put on the stage in the
Elizabethan age; and though even in the play of "Patient Grissil" (by
Chettle and others), it is not easy to reconcile the husband's
proceedings with the promptings of common sense, yet the playwrights,
with the instinct of their craft, contrived to introduce some element
of humanity into his character and of probability into his conduct.
Again the supra-chivalrous respect paid by Arviragus, the Breton knight
of the "Franklin's Tale," to the sanctity of his wife's word, seriously
to the peril of his own and his wife's honour, is an effort to which
probably even the Knight of La Mancha himself would have proved
unequal. It is not to be expected that Chaucer should have failed to
share some of the prejudices of his times as well as to fall in with
their ways of thought and sentiment; and though it is the "Prioress"
who tells a story against the Jews which passes the legend of Hugh of
Lincoln, yet it would be very hazardous to seek any irony in this
legend of bigotry. In general, much of that naivete which to modern
readers seems Chaucer's most obvious literary quality must be ascribed
to the times in which he lived and wrote. This quality is in truth by
no means that which most deeply impresses itself upon the observation
of any one able to compare Chaucer's writings with those of his more
immediate predecessors and succes