The Pastons and Chaucer (1925)
The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air, and
the arch still stands from which Sir John Fastolf’s barges sailed out to
fetch stone for the building of the great castle. But now jackdaws nest
on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six acres of ground,
only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and surmounted by
battlements, though there are neither archers within nor cannon without.
As for the “seven religious men” and the “seven poor folk” who should,
at this very moment, be praying for the souls of Sir John and his
parents, there is no sign of them nor sound of their prayers. The place
is a ruin. Antiquaries speculate and differ.
Not so very far off lie more ruins—the ruins of Bromholm Priory, where
John Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was only a
mile or so away, lying on low ground by the sea, twenty miles north of
Norwich. The coast is dangerous, and the land, even in our time,
inaccessible. Nevertheless the little bit of wood at Bromholm, the
fragment of the true Cross, brought pilgrims incessantly to the Priory,
and sent them away with eyes opened and limbs straightened. But some of
them with their newly-opened eyes saw a sight which shocked them—the
grave of John Paston in Bromholm Priory without a tombstone. The news
spread over the country-side. The Pastons had fallen; they that had been
so powerful could no longer afford a stone to put above John Paston’s
head. Margaret, his widow, could not pay her debts; the eldest son, Sir
John, wasted his property upon women and tournaments, while the younger,
John also, though a man of greater parts, thought more of his hawks than
of his harvests.
The pilgrims of course were liars, as people whose eyes have just been
opened by a piece of the true Cross have every right to be; but their
news, none the less, was welcome. The Pastons had risen in the world.
People said even that they had been bondmen not so very long ago. At any
rate, men still living could remember John’s grandfather Clement tilling
his own land, a hard-working peasant; and William, Clement’s son,
becoming a judge and buying land; and John, William’s son, marrying well
and buying more land and quite lately inheriting the vast new castle at
Caister, and all Sir John’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk. People said
that he had forged the old knight’s will. What wonder, then, that he
lacked a tombstone? But, if we consider the character of Sir John
Paston, John’s eldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings, and
the relations between himself and his father as the family letters
reveal them, we shall see how difficult it was, and how likely to be
neglected—this business of making his father’s tombstone.
For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to us at
the present moment, a raw, new-built house, without telephone, bathroom,
or drains, arm-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books,
unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The windows look out upon a few
cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them there is the sea
on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the fen, but
there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm hands reports, is big
enough to swallow a carriage. And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad
bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked,
threatening to kill any one who approaches him. That is what they talk
about at dinner in the desolate house, while the chimney smokes
horribly, and the draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are
given to lock all gates at sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has
worn itself away, simply and solemnly, girt about with dangers as they
are, these isolated men and women fall upon their knees in prayer.
In the fifteenth century, however, the wild landscape was broken
suddenly and very strangely by vast piles of brand-new masonry. There
rose out of the sand-hills and heaths of the Norfolk coast a huge bulk
of stone, like a modern hotel in a watering-place; but there was no
parade, no lodging houses, and no pier at Yarmouth then, and this
gigantic building on the outskirts of the town was built to house one
solitary old gentleman without any children—Sir John Fastolf, who had
fought at Agincourt and acquired great wealth. He had fought at
Agincourt and got but little reward. No one took his advice. Men spoke
ill of him behind his back. He was well aware of it; his temper was none
the sweeter for it. He was a hot-tempered old man, powerful, embittered
by a sense of grievance. But whether on the battlefield or at court he
thought perpetually of Caister, and how, when his duties allowed, he
would settle down on his father’s land and live in a great house of his
own building.
The gigantic structure of Caister Castle was in progress not so many
miles away when the little Pastons were children. John Paston, the
father, had charge of some part of the business, and the children
listened, as soon as they could listen at all, to talk of stone and
building, of barges gone to London and not yet returned, of the
twenty-six private chambers, of the hall and chapel; of foundations,
measurements, and rascally work-people. Later, in 1454, when the work
was finished and Sir John had come to spend his last years at Caister,
they may have seen for themselves the mass of treasure that was stored
there; the tables laden with gold and silver plate; the wardrobes
stuffed with gowns of velvet and satin and cloth of gold, with hoods and
tippets and beaver hats and leather jackets and velvet doublets; and how
the very pillow-cases on the beds were of green and purple silk. There
were tapestries everywhere. The beds were laid and the bedrooms hung
with tapestries representing sieges, hunting and hawking, men fishing,
archers shooting, ladies playing on their harps, dallying with ducks, or
a giant “bearing the leg of a bear in his hand”. Such were the fruits of
a well-spent life. To buy land, to build great houses, to stuff these
houses full of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well be in
the bedroom), was the proper aim of mankind. Mr. and Mrs. Paston spent
the greater part of their energies in the same exhausting occupation.
For since the passion to acquire was universal, one could never rest
secure in one’s possessions for long. The outlying parts of one’s
property were in perpetual jeopardy. The Duke of Norfolk might covet
this manor, the Duke of Suffolk that. Some trumped-up excuse, as for
instance that the Pastons were bondmen, gave them the right to seize the
house and batter down the lodges in the owner’s absence. And how could
the owner of Paston and Mauteby and Drayton and Gresham be in five or
six places at once, especially now that Caister Castle was his, and he
must be in London trying to get his rights recognised by the King? The
King was mad too, they said; did not know his own child, they said; or
the King was in flight; or there was civil war in the land. Norfolk was
always the most distressed of counties and its country gentlemen the
most quarrelsome of mankind. Indeed, had Mrs. Paston chosen, she could
have told her children how when she was a young woman a thousand men
with bows and arrows and pans of burning fire had marched upon Gresham
and broken the gates and mined the walls of the room where she sat
alone. But much worse things than that had happened to women. She
neither bewailed her lot nor thought herself a heroine. The long, long
letters which she wrote so laboriously in her clear cramped hand to her
husband, who was (as usual) away, make no mention of herself. The sheep
had wasted the hay. Heyden’s and Tuddenham’s men were out. A dyke had
been broken and a bullock stolen. They needed treacle badly, and really
she must have stuff for a dress.
But Mrs. Paston did not talk about herself.
Thus the little Pastons would see their mother writing or dictating page
after page, hour after hour, long, long letters, but to interrupt a
parent who writes so laboriously of such important matters would have
been a sin. The prattle of children, the lore of the nursery or
schoolroom, did not find its way into these elaborate communications.
For the most part her letters are the letters of an honest bailiff to
his master, explaining, asking advice, giving news, rendering accounts.
There was robbery and manslaughter; it was difficult to get in the
rents; Richard Calle had gathered but little money; and what with one
thing and another Margaret had not had time to make out, as she should
have done, the inventory of the goods which her husband desired. Well
might old Agnes, surveying her son’s affairs rather grimly from a
distance, counsel him to contrive it so that “ye may have less to do in
the world; your father said. In little business lieth much rest. This
world is but a thoroughfare, and full of woe; and when we depart
therefrom, right nought bear with us but our good deeds and ill.”
The thought of death would thus come upon them in a clap. Old Fastolf,
cumbered with wealth and property, had his vision at the end of Hell
fire, and shrieked aloud to his executors to distribute alms, and see
that prayers were said “in perpetuum”, so that his soul might escape the
agonies of purgatory. William Paston, the judge, was urgent too that the
monks of Norwich should be retained to pray for his soul “for ever”. The
soul was no wisp of air, but a solid body capable of eternal suffering,
and the fire that destroyed it was as fierce as any that burnt on mortal
grates. For ever there would be monks and the town of Norwich, and for
ever the Chapel of Our Lady in the town of Norwich. There was something
matter-of-fact, positive, and enduring in their conception both of life
and of death.
With the plan of existence so vigorously marked out, children of course
were well beaten, and boys and girls taught to know their places. They
must acquire land; but they must obey their parents. A mother would
clout her daughter’s head three times a week and break the skin if she
did not conform to the laws of behaviour. Agnes Paston, a lady of birth
and breeding, beat her daughter Elizabeth. Margaret Paston, a
softer-hearted woman, turned her daughter out of the house for loving
the honest bailiff Richard Calle. Brothers would not suffer their
sisters to marry beneath them, and “sell candle and mustard in
Framlingham”. The fathers quarrelled with the sons, and the mothers,
fonder of their boys than of their girls, yet bound by all law and
custom to obey their husbands, were torn asunder in their efforts to
keep the peace. With all her pains, Margaret failed to prevent rash acts
on the part of her eldest son John, or the bitter words with which his
father denounced him. He was a “drone among bees”, the father burst out,
“which labour for gathering honey in the fields, and the drone doth
naught but taketh his part of it”. He treated his parents with
insolence, and yet was fit for no charge of responsibility abroad.
But the quarrel was ended, very shortly, by the death (22nd May 1466) of
John Paston, the father, in London. The body was brought down to
Bromholm to be buried. Twelve poor men trudged all the way bearing
torches beside it. Alms were distributed; masses and dirges were said.
Bells were rung. Great quantities of fowls, sheep, pigs, eggs, bread,
and cream were devoured, ale and wine drunk, and candles burnt. Two
panes were taken from the church windows to let out the reek of the
torches. Black cloth was distributed, and a light set burning on the
grave. But John Paston, the heir, delayed to make his father’s
tombstone.
He was a young man, something over twenty-four years of age. The
discipline and the drudgery of a country life bored him. When he ran
away from home, it was, apparently, to attempt to enter the King’s
household. Whatever doubts, indeed, might be cast by their enemies on
the blood of the Pastons, Sir John was unmistakably a gentleman. He had
inherited his lands; the honey was his that the bees had gathered with
so much labour. He had the instincts of enjoyment rather than of
acquisition, and with his mother’s parsimony was strangely mixed
something of his father’s ambition. Yet his own indolent and luxurious
temperament took the edge from both. He was attractive to women, liked
society and tournaments, and court life and making bets, and sometimes,
even, reading books. And so life, now that John Paston was buried,
started afresh upon rather a different foundation. There could be little
outward change indeed. Margaret still ruled the house. She still ordered
the lives of the younger children as she had ordered the lives of the
elder. The boys still needed to be beaten into book-learning by their
tutors, the girls still loved the wrong men and must be married to the
right. Rents had to be collected; the interminable lawsuit for the
Fastolf property dragged on. Battles were fought; the roses of York and
Lancaster alternately faded and flourished. Norfolk was full of poor
people seeking redress for their grievances, and Margaret worked for her
son as she had worked for her husband, with this significant change
only, that now, instead of confiding in her husband, she took the advice
of her priest.
But inwardly there was a change. It seems at last as if the hard outer
shell had served its purpose and something sensitive, appreciative, and
pleasure-loving had formed within. At any rate Sir John, writing to his
brother John at home, strayed sometimes from the business on hand to
crack a joke, to send a piece of gossip, or to instruct him, knowingly
and even subtly, upon the conduct of a love affair. Be “as lowly to the
mother as ye list, but to the maid not too lowly, nor that ye be too
glad to speed, nor too sorry to fail. And I shall always be your herald
both here, if she come hither, and at home, when I come home, which I
hope hastily within XI. days at the furthest.” And then a hawk was to be
bought, a hat, or new silk laces sent down to John in Norfolk,
prosecuting his suit, flying his hawks, and attending with considerable
energy and not too nice a sense of honesty to the affairs of the Paston
estates.
The lights had long since burnt out on John Paston’s grave. But still
Sir John delayed; no tomb replaced them. He had his excuses; what with
the business of the lawsuit, and his duties at Court, and the
disturbance of the civil wars, his time was occupied and his money
spent. But perhaps something strange had happened to Sir John himself,
and not only to Sir John dallying in London, but to his sister Margery
falling in love with the bailiff, and to Walter making Latin verses at
Eton, and to John flying his hawks at Paston. Life was a little more
various in its pleasures. They were not quite so sure as the elder
generation had been of the rights of man and of the dues of God, of the
horrors of death, and of the importance of tombstones. Poor Margaret
Paston scented the change and sought uneasily, with the pen which had
marched so stiffly through so many pages, to lay bare the root of her
troubles. It was not that the lawsuit saddened her; she was ready to
defend Caister with her own hands if need be, “though I cannot well
guide nor rule soldiers”, but there was something wrong with the family
since the death of her husband and master. Perhaps her son had failed in
his service to God; he had been too proud or too lavish in his
expenditure; or perhaps he had shown too little mercy to the poor.
Whatever the fault might be, she only knew that Sir John spent twice as
much money as his father for less result; that they could scarcely pay
their debts without selling land, wood, or household stuff (“It is a
death to me to think if it”); while every day people spoke ill of them
in the country because they left John Paston to lie without a tombstone.
The money that might have bought it, or more land, and more goblets and
more tapestry, was spent by Sir John on clocks and trinkets, and upon
paying a clerk to copy out Treatises upon Knighthood and other such
stuff. There they stood at Paston—eleven volumes, with the poems of
Lydgate and Chaucer among them, diffusing a strange air into the gaunt,
comfortless house, inviting men to indolence and vanity, distracting
their thoughts from business, and leading them not only to neglect their
own profit but to think lightly of the sacred dues of the dead.
For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops
or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight,
reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind
lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading
Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it
that he drew from books? Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing.
A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like
dashes of rain on the window pane. There was no reason in it as there
had been for his father; no imperative need to establish a family and
acquire an important position for children who were not born, or if
born, had no right to bear their father’s name. But Lydgate’s poems or
Chaucer’s, like a mirror in which figures move brightly, silently, and
compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew,
but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from
London or piecing out from his mother’s gossip some country tragedy of
love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before
him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some
description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it,
or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure
of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the
end of the story.
To learn the end of the story—Chaucer can still make us wish to do
that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost the
rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as
it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount
them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of
greater interest to say, and for these reasons natural story-tellers
like Mr. Garnett, whom we must distinguish from self-conscious
story-tellers like Mr. Masefield, have become rare. For the
story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his
story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow
it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us
time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.
Chaucer was helped to this to some extent by the time of his birth; and
in addition he had another advantage over the moderns which will never
come the way of English poets again. England was an unspoilt country.
His eyes rested on a virgin land, all unbroken grass and wood except for
the small towns and an occasional castle in the building. No villa roofs
peered through Kentish tree-tops; no factory chimney smoked on the
hillside. The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature,
how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do
not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her
cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than
the prose writer. To the modern poet, with Birmingham, Manchester, and
London the size they are, the country is the sanctuary of moral
excellence in contrast with the town which is the sink of vice. It is a
retreat, the haunt of modesty and virtue, where men go to hide and
moralise. There is something morbid, as if shrinking from human contact,
in the nature worship of Wordsworth, still more in the microscopic
devotion which Tennyson lavished upon the petals of roses and the buds
of lime trees. But these were great poets. In their hands, the country
was no mere jeweller’s shop, or museum of curious objects to be
described, even more curiously, in words. Poets of smaller gift, since
the view is so much spoilt, and the garden or the meadow must replace
the barren heath and the precipitous mountain-side, are now confined to
little landscapes, to birds’ nests, to acorns with every wrinkle drawn
to the life. The wider landscape is lost.
But to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be altogether
agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful experience of
their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and the
jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the gay and definite.
Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in word-painting which is
the modern inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even, when we
come to look, without a single word of direct description, the sense of
the open air.
And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge
—that is enough.
Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy faces,
or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes, therefore,
disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with the
hardness and the freshness of an actual presence. Soon, however, we
notice something of greater importance than the gay and picturesque
appearance of the mediaeval world—the solidity which plumps it out, the
conviction which animates the characters. There is immense variety in
the _Canterbury Tales_, and yet, persisting underneath, one consistent
type. Chaucer has his world; he has his young men; he has his young
women. If one met them straying in Shakespeare’s world one would know
them to be Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s. He wants to describe a girl,
and this is what she looks like:
Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was,
Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
Then he goes on to develop her; she was a girl, a virgin, cold in her
virginity:
I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to been a wyf and be with childe.
Next he bethinks him how
Discreet she was in answering alway;
And though she had been as wise as Pallas
No countrefeted termes hadde she
To seme wys; but after hir degree
She spak, and alle hir wordes more and lesse
Souninge in vertu and in gentillesse.
Each of these quotations, in fact, comes from a different Tale, but they
are parts, one feels, of the same personage, whom he had in mind,
perhaps unconsciously, when he thought of a young girl, and for this
reason, as she goes in and out of the _Canterbury Tales_ bearing
different names, she has a stability which is only to be found where the
poet has made up his mind about young women, of course, but also about
the world they live in, its end, its nature, and his own craft and
technique, so that his mind is free to apply its force fully to its
object. It does not occur to him that his Griselda might be improved or
altered. There is no blur about her, no hesitation; she proves nothing;
she is content to be herself. Upon her, therefore, the mind can rest
with that unconscious ease which allows it, from hints and suggestions,
to endow her with many more qualities than are actually referred to.
Such is the power of conviction, a rare gift, a gift shared in our day
by Joseph Conrad in his earlier novels, and a gift of supreme
importance, for upon it the whole weight of the building depends. Once
believe in Chaucer’s young men and women and we have no need of
preaching or protest. We know what he finds good, what evil; the less
said the better. Let him get on with his story, paint knights and
squires, good women and bad, cooks, shipmen, priests, and we will supply
the landscape, give his society its belief, its standing towards life
and death, and make of the journey to Canterbury a spiritual pilgrimage.
This simple faithfulness to his own conceptions was easier then than now
in one respect at least, for Chaucer could write frankly where we must
either say nothing or say it slyly. He could sound every note in the
language instead of finding a great many of the best gone dumb from
disuse, and thus, when struck by daring fingers, giving off a loud
discordant jangle out of keeping with the rest. Much of Chaucer—a few
lines perhaps in each of the Tales—is improper and gives us as we read
it the strange sensation of being naked to the air after being muffled
in old clothing. And, as a certain kind of humour depends upon being
able to speak without self-consciousness of the parts and functions of
the body, so with the advent of decency literature lost the use of one
of its limbs. It lost its power to create the Wife of Bath, Juliet’s
nurse, and their recognisable though already colourless relation, Moll
Flanders. Sterne, from fear of coarseness, is forced into indecency. He
must be witty, not humorous. He must hint instead of speaking outright.
Nor can we believe, with Mr. Joyce’s _Ulysses_ before us, that laughter
of the old kind will ever be heard again.
But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me
Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote.
Unto this day it doth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
The sound of that old woman’s voice is still.
But there is another and more important reason for the surprising
brightness, the still effective merriment of the _Canterbury Tales_.
Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being
lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its
dung, its cocks and its hens is not (we have come to think) a poetic
subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to
require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of
mythological origin. But Chaucer says outright:
Three large sowes hadde she, and namo,
Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle;
or again,
A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute
With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute.
He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get close up to his
object—an old man’s chin—
With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte,
Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere;
or an old man’s neck—
The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh
Whyl that he sang;
and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what
they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this
very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without
dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of the Greeks or the
Romans, it is only that his story leads him there. He has no desire to
wrap himself round in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or to shirk the
associations of common grocer’s English.
Therefore when we say that we know the end of the journey, it is hard to
quote the particular lines from which we take our knowledge. He fixed
his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world to come. He was
little given to abstract contemplation. He deprecated, with peculiar
archness, any competition with the scholars and divines:
The answere of this I lete to divynis,
But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is.
What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in the colde grave
Allone, withouten any companye,
he asks, or ponders
O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your worde eterne,
And wryten in the table of athamaunt
Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,
What is mankinde more un-to yow holde
Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?
Questions press upon him; he asks questions, but he is too true a poet
to answer them; he leaves them unsolved, uncramped by the solution of
the moment, thus fresh for the generations that come after him. In his
life, too, it would be impossible to write him down a man of this party
or of that, a democrat or an aristocrat. He was a staunch churchman, but
he laughed at priests. He was an able public servant and a courtier, but
his views upon sexual morality were extremely lax. He sympathised with
poverty, but did nothing to improve the lot of the poor. It is safe to
say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another
because of anything that Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him,
we are of course absorbing morality at every pore. For among writers
there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and
lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed
their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the
world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley are among the priests; they give us
text after text to be hung upon the wall, saying after saying to be laid
upon the heart like an amulet against disaster—
Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone
He prayeth best that loveth best
All things both great and small
—such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly. But
Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary
people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other.
We see them eating, drinking, laughing, and making love, and come to
feel without a word being said what their standards are and so are
steeped through and through with their morality. There can be no more
forcible preaching than this where all actions and passions are
represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray
and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves. It is the morality of
ordinary intercourse, the morality of the novel, which parents and
librarians rightly judge to be far more persuasive than the morality of
poetry.
And so, when we shut Chaucer, we feel that without a word being said the
criticism is complete; what we are saying, thinking, reading, doing has
been commented upon. Nor are we left merely with the sense, powerful
though that is, of having been in good company and got used to the ways
of good society. For as we have jogged through the real, the unadorned
country-side, with first one good fellow cracking his joke or singing
his song and then another, we know that though this world resembles, it
is not in fact our daily world. It is the world of poetry. Everything
happens here more quickly and more intensely, and with better order than
in life or in prose; there is a formal elevated dullness which is part
of the incantation of poetry; there are lines speaking half a second in
advance what we were about to say, as if we read our thoughts before
words cumbered them; and lines which we go back to read again with that
heightened quality, that enchantment which keeps them glittering in the
mind long afterwards. And the whole is held in its place, and its
variety and divagations ordered by the power which is among the most
impressive of all—the shaping power, the architect’s power. It is the
peculiarity of Chaucer, however, that though we feel at once this
quickening, this enchantment, we cannot prove it by quotation. From most
poets quotation is easy and obvious; some metaphor suddenly flowers;
some passage breaks off from the rest. But Chaucer is very equal, very
even-paced, very unmetaphorical. If we take six or seven lines in the
hope that the quality will be contained in them it has escaped.
My lord, ye woot that in my fadres place,
Ye dede me strepe out of my povre wede,
And richely me cladden, o your grace
To yow broghte I noght elles, out of drede,
But feyth and nakedness and maydenhede.
In its place that seemed not only memorable and moving but fit to set
beside striking beauties. Cut out and taken separately it appears
ordinary and quiet. Chaucer, it seems, has some art by which the most
ordinary words and the simplest feelings when laid side by side make
each other shine; when separated lose their lustre. Thus the pleasure he
gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us,
because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or
observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens,
millers, old peasant women, flowers—there is a special stimulus in
seeing all these common things so arranged that they affect us as poetry
affects us, and are yet bright, sober, precise as we see them out of
doors. There is a pungency in this unfigurative language; a stately and
memorable beauty in the undraped sentences which follow each other like
women so slightly veiled that you see the lines of their bodies as they
go—
And she set down hir water pot anon
Biside the threshold in an oxe’s stall.
And then, as the procession takes its way, tranquilly, beautifully, out
from behind peeps the face of Chaucer, grinning, malicious, in league
with all foxes, donkeys, and hens, to mock the pomp and ceremonies of
life—witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based upon a broad
bottom of English humour.
So Sir John read his Chaucer in the comfortless room with the wind
blowing and the smoke stinging, and left his father’s tombstone unmade.
But no book, no tomb, had power to hold him long. He was one of those
ambiguous characters who haunt the boundary line where one age merges in
another and are not able to inhabit either. At one moment he was all for
buying books cheap; next he was off to France and told his mother, “My
mind is now not most upon books”. In his own house, where his mother
Margaret was perpetually making out inventories or confiding in Gloys
the priest, he had no peace or comfort. There was always reason on her
side; she was a brave woman, for whose sake one must put up with the
priest’s insolence and choke down one’s rage when the grumbling broke
into open abuse, and “Thou proud priest” and “Thou proud Squire” were
bandied angrily about the room. All this, with the discomforts of life
and the weakness of his own character, drove him to loiter in pleasanter
places, to put off coming, to put off writing, to put off, year after
year, the making of his father’s tombstone.
Yet John Paston had now lain for twelve years under the bare ground. The
Prior of Bromholm sent word that the grave cloth was in tatters, and he
had tried to patch it himself. Worse still, for a proud woman like
Margaret Paston, the country people murmured at the Pastons’ lack of
piety, and other families she heard, of no greater standing than theirs,
spent money in pious restoration in the very church where her husband
lay unremembered. At last, turning from tournaments and Chaucer and
Mistress Anne Hault, Sir John bethought him of a piece of cloth of gold
which had been used to cover his father’s hearse and might now be sold
to defray the expenses of his tomb. Margaret had it in safe keeping; she
had hoarded it and cared for it, and spent twenty marks on its repair.
She grudged it; but there was no help for it. She sent it him, still
distrusting his intentions or his power to put them into effect. “If you
sell it to any other use,” she wrote, “by my troth I shall never trust
you while I live.”
But this final act, like so many that Sir John had undertaken in the
course of his life, was left undone. A dispute with the Duke of Suffolk
in the year 1479 made it necessary for him to visit London in spite of
the epidemic of sickness that was abroad; and there, in dirty lodgings,
alone, busy to the end with quarrels, clamorous to the end for money,
Sir John died and was buried at Whitefriars in London. He left a natural
daughter; he left a considerable number of books; but his father’s tomb
was still unmade.
The four thick volumes of the Paston letters, however, swallow up this
frustrated man as the sea absorbs a raindrop. For, like all collections
of letters, they seem to hint that we need not care overmuch for the
fortunes of individuals. The family will go on whether Sir John lives or
dies. It is their method to heap up in mounds of insignificant and often
dismal dust the innumerable trivialities of daily life, as it grinds
itself out, year after year. And then suddenly they blaze up; the day
shines out, complete, alive, before our eyes. It is early morning and
strange men have been whispering among the women as they milk. It is
evening, and there in the churchyard Warne’s wife bursts out against old
Agnes Paston: “All the devils of Hell draw her soul to Hell.” Now it is
the autumn in Norfolk and Cecily Dawne comes whining to Sir John for
clothing. “Moreover, Sir, liketh it your mastership to understand that
winter and cold weather draweth nigh and I have few clothes but of your
gift.” There is the ancient day, spread out before us, hour by hour.
But in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake; no use of the
pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades of
endearment and intimacy which have filled so many English letters since.
Only occasionally, under stress of anger for the most part, does
Margaret Paston quicken into some shrewd saw or solemn curse. “Men cut
large thongs here out of other men’s leather. . . . We beat the bushes
and other men have the birds. . . . Haste reweth . . . which is to my
heart a very spear.” That is her eloquence and that her anguish. Her
sons, it is true, bend their pens more easily to their will. They jest
rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little scene like
a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger and give a phrase or two
directly as they were spoken in person. But when Chaucer lived he must
have heard this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far
better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable of religious
solemnity or of broad humour, but very stiff material to put on the lips
of men and women accosting each other face to face. In short it is easy
to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not _Lear_ or _Romeo
and Juliet_, but the _Canterbury Tales_.
Sir John was buried; and John the younger brother succeeded in his turn.
The Paston letters go on; life at Paston continues much the same as
before. Over it all broods a sense of discomfort and nakedness; of
unwashed limbs thrust into splendid clothing; of tapestry blowing on the
draughty walls; of the bedroom with its privy; of winds sweeping
straight over land unmitigated by hedge or town; of Caister Castle
covering with solid stone six acres of ground, and of the plain-faced
Pastons indefatigably accumulating wealth, treading out the roads of
Norfolk, and persisting with an obstinate courage which does them
infinite credit in furnishing the bareness of England.
[Footnote 1: _The Paston Letters_, edited by Dr. James
Gairdner (1904), 4 vols.]