The New Lifetime Reading Plan

For that reason, and despite the (to us) remote exoticism of its setting, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms can still be read and enjoyed today as a surprisingly modern adventure tale and, as the ultimate boys' book writer Rudyard Kipling might have said, a cracking good yarn. Fortunately it can now be read in the superb new translation by Moss Roberts; his work has made ali other translations obsolete—don't settle for any other.

J.S.M.

32

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

I342-I4OO

The Canterbury Tales

As Dante's great poem is called The Divine Comedy [30], so Chaucer^ has often been called the Human Comedy. It is a fair distinction. Dante loved God; Chaucer loved human beings, including the imperfect and even sinful ones. Dante fixed his eye on those paths leading to perdition, purification, and felicity; Chaucer fixed his on the crowded highway of actual daily life. Both wrote of journeys. Dante's is a journey through three symbolic universes. But Chaucer takes thirty- odd Englishmen and Englishwomen of the fourteenth century on a real journey, on a real English road, starting at a real inn at Southwark, then just outside of London, and ending at the real town of Canterbury. Though Chaucer was greatly influ- enced by Dante, the two supreme poets of the European Middle Ages could not have been more unlike in tempera- ment.

Their careers, too, though parallel in some respects, turned out differently. Like Dante, Chaucer was a civil servant. Serving under three kings he held various posts, many quite important, such as economic envoy, Controller of Customs, Clerk of the King's Works, Justice of the Peace, and others. He

seems to have met with one or two brief periods of disfavor, but on the whole his life was lived close to the centers of English power. He rose steadily in the world, and ali the evi- dence suggests a successful career, marked by lively contacts with the stir and bustle of his day, and sufficiently relaxed to allow time for the composition of a great number of works in both verse and prose.

He lacks Dante's depth, bitterness, intensity, vast scholar- ship, and complexity of imagination. Instead he offers more ingratiating if less overwhelming talents: broad humanity, humor, a quick but tolerant eye for the weaknesses of human nature, an unmatched gift for storytelling, a musical gift of a lower order than Dante's but nonetheless superb, and most of ali a certain open-air candor that makes us at once eager to claim him as a friend.

As the Prologue indicates, The Canterbury Tales was origi- nally conceived as perhaps one hundred twenty narratives of ali kinds, held together by the ingenious device of having a band of pilgrims, bound for Thomas Becket's shrine, tell sto- ries to while away the tedium of travei. Chaucer completed twenty-one of these, with three left unfinished or interrupted. Several are dull exercises in sermonizing and are well skipped. The Prologue, of course, must be read; it is perhaps the most delightful portrait gallery in ali literature. The tales most gen- erally admired are the ones told by the Knight, the Miller, the Prioress, the Nun's Priest, the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath (Chaucers greatest single character, and comparable to Shakespeare's supreme achievements in comic portraiture), the Clerk, the Merchant, the Squire, and the Canon's Yeoman. I suggest you also read the various prologues, epilogues, and conversations that link the stories. Many readers prefer them to the Tales themselves.

Chaucer is a perfect yarn spinner, the founder of English realism, and an entrancing human being. He is also full of interesting information. He paints an immortal picture of Catholic medieval England, with ali the warts left in, in colors as fresh and lively as though applied only yesterday. He can be read without any scholarly apparatus at ali, though most edi- tions supply a handful of notes explaining those customs and manners peculiar to his day. His book is an open book, like the Odyssey [3]and unlike The Divine Comedy. He makes you feel that a clear-eyed man of the world has taken you by the arm to tell you about the men and women of his time and, lo, they turn out to be oddly like the men and women of ours. There are no mysteries in Chaucer. Even when he is allegorical, he is plain and forthright.

If you are lucky enough to have an exceptional feeling for English words, you may find it quite possible to read a good deal of Chaucer in the original Middle English—at any rate the Prologue. But most of us need a translation, either a sound prose version (I like Lumiansky^) or the verse renderings by Coghill or Wright.

C.F.

33

ANONYMOUS

ca. 1500

The Thousand and One Nights