Concerning his domestic relations, we may regard it as virtually certain that he was unhappy as a husband, though tender and affectionate as a father. Considering how vast a proportion of the satire of all times--but more especially that of the Middle Ages, and in these again pre-eminently of the period of European literature which took its tone from Jean de Meung--is directed against woman and against married life, it would be difficult to decide how much of the irony, sarcasm, and fun lavished by Chaucer on these themes is due to a fashion with which he readily fell in, and how much to the impulse of personal feeling. A perfect anthology, or perhaps one should rather say a complete herbarium, might be collected from his works of samples of these attacks on women. He has manifestly made a careful study of their ways, with which he now and then betrays that curiously intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a Richardson or a Balzac. How accurate are such incidental remarks as this, that women are "full measurable" in such matters as sleep--not caring for so much of it at a time as men do! How wonderfully natural is the description of Cressid's bevy of lady-visitors, attracted by the news that she is shortly to be surrendered to the Greeks, and of the "nice vanity"i.e. foolish emptiness--of their consolatory gossip. "As men see in town, and all about, that women are accustomed to visit their friends," so a swarm of ladies came to Cressid, "and sat themselves down, and said as Ishall tell. 'I am delighted,' says one, 'that you will so soon see your father.' 'Indeed I am not so delighted,' says another, 'for we have not seen half enough of her since she has been at Troy.' 'I do hope,' quoth the third, 'that she will bring us back peace with her; in which case may Almighty God guide her on her departure.' And Cressid heard these words and womanish things as if she were far away; for she was burning all the time with another passion than any of which they knew; so that she almost felt her heart die for woe, and for weariness of that company." But his satire against women is rarely so innocent as this; and though several ladies take part in the Canterbury Pilgrimage, yet pilgrim after pilgrim has his saw or jest against their sex. The courteous "Knight" cannot refrain from the generalisation that women all follow the favour of fortune. The "Summoner," who is of a less scrupulous sort, introduces a diatribe against women's passionate love of vengeance; and the "Shipman"seasons a story which requires no such addition by an enumeration of their favourite foibles. But the climax is reached in the confessions of the "Wife of Bath," who quite unhesitatingly says that women are best won by flattery and busy attentions; that when won they desire to have the sovereignty over their husbands, and that they tell untruths and swear to them with twice the boldness of men;--while as to the power of their tongue, she quotes the second-hand authority of her fifth husband for the saying that it is better to dwell with a lion or a foul dragon, than with a woman accustomed to chide. It is true that this same "Wife of Bath"also observes with an effective tu quoque:--
By God, if women had but written stories, As clerkes have within their oratories, They would have writ of men more wickedness Than all the race of Adam may redress;and the "Legend of Good Women" seems, in point of fact, to have been intended to offer some such kind of amends as is here declared to be called for. But the balance still remains heavy against the poet's sentiments of gallantry and respect for women. It should at the same time be remembered that among the "Canterbury Tales" the two which are of their kind the most effective, constitute tributes to the most distinctively feminine and wifely virtue of fidelity. Moreover, when coming from such personages as the pilgrims who narrate the "Tales" in question, the praise of women has special significance and value. The "Merchant" and the "Shipman" may indulge in facetious or coarse jibes against wives and their behaviour, but the "Man of Law," full of grave experience of the world, is a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of which his narrative celebrates so illustrious an example, while the "Clerk of Oxford" has in his cloistered solitude, where all womanly blandishments are unknown, come to the conclusion that:
Men speak of Job, most for his humbleness, As clerkes, when they list, can well indite, Of men in special; but, in truthfulness, Though praise by clerks of women be but slight, No man in humbleness can him acquit As women can, nor can be half so true As women are, unless all things be new.
As to marriage, Chaucer may be said generally to treat it in that style of laughing with a wry mouth, which has from time immemorial been affected both in comic writing and on the comic stage, but which, in the end, even the most determined old bachelor feels an occasional inclination to consider monotonous.
In all this, however, it is obvious that something at least must be set down to conventionality. Yet the best part of Chaucer's nature, it is hardly necessary to say, was neither conventional nor commonplace. He was not, we may rest assured, one of that numerous class which in his days, as it does in ours, composed the population of the land of Philistia--the persons so well defined by the Scottish poet, Sir David Lyndsay (himself a courtier of the noblest type):--Who fixed have their hearts and whole intents On sensual lust, on dignity, and rents.
