untry-side--the poor parson, threadbare,
learned, and devout, ("Christ's lore and his apostles twelve he taught, and
first he followed it himself")--the summoner with his fiery face--the
pardoner with his wallet "bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot"--the
lively prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth,
and "Amor vincit omnia" graven on her brooch. 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. Around them crowd types of English industry: the
merchant; the franklin in whose house "it snowed of meat and drink"; the
sailor fresh from frays in the Channel; the buxom wife of Bath; the
broad-shouldered miller; the haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, dyer,
tapestry-maker, each in the livery of his craft; and last the honest
ploughman who would dyke and delve for the poor without hire. It is the
first time in English poetry that we are brought face to face not with
characters or allegories or reminiscences of the past, but with living and
breathing men, men distinct in temper and sentiment as in face or costume
or mode of speech; and with this distinctness of each maintained throughout
the story by a thousand shades of expression and action. It is the first
time, too, that we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each
character but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each
tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it but fuses all into a
poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity,
which surrounds us in the "Canterbury Tales." In some of the stories
indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the
tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a
whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action.
Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel--a
training not of books but of life. And it is life that he loves--the
delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its laughter and its
tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett-like adventures of
the miller and the clerks. It is this largeness of heart, this wide
tolerance, which enables him to ref