Troilus and Criseide
[In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1958. Donaldson presents the theme of Troilus and Criseyde as a paradoxical statement in which Chaucer asserts both the importance and the transitory nature of human values.]
Chaucer's longest single poem is his greatest artistic achievement and one of the greatest in English literature. It possesses to the highest degree that quality, which characterizes most great poetry, of being always open to reinterpretation, of yielding different meanings to different generations and kinds of readers, who, no matter how they may disagree with one another on even its most important points, nevertheless agree in sharing the profoundly moving experience the poem offers them. Its highly elusive quality, which not only permits but encourages a multiplicity of interpretations, is in no way the result of incompetence on the part of the poet, but something carefully sought after as the best way of expressing a complex vision.
Chaucer is believed to have completed the work about 1385 or 1386, with some fifteen years of productivity remaining to him. Only extraordinary resourcefulness could bring it about that, having accomplished in Troilus what might well seem the principal work of his life, he was able to turn to other themes and other attitudes with undiminished energy and enthusiasm for experimentation. Readers occasionally wonder why romantic love—which is both a theme and an attitude—plays so little part in the Canterbury Tales that employed the last years of his life: the explanation lies in Troilus. Chaucer was apparently aware that he could not surpass his own treatment of this subject. And magnificent as the Canterbury collection is, both in the large conception and in the individual tales, Troilus' grandeur remains unsurpassed.
The source of the poem is one of Boccaccio's youthful works, the Filostrato (the Love-Stricken, according to Boccaccio's false etymology), a passionate narrative of 5700 Unes in stanzaic Italian verse, completed before 1350, probably about 1340. Boccaccio's poem, in the original Italian and in a French translation, furnished Chaucer the essential plot, most of the narrative details—though Chaucer made a number of important additions—and even with a number of lines readily adapted to translation into English. Yet the qualities of the two poems are entirely different, and Chaucer's is, artistically speaking, by far the more original. In the clear, brilliant light of the Italian work everything seems fully realized, fully understood. One reads with interest, admiration, and excitement: the mind's eye is filled. Yet there is little in the poem that does not meet the eye, and the reader does not tend to re-create what he has seen after he no longer sees it. By contrast, Chaucer's poem is mist-enshrouded: the sun does, indeed, break through at times, but things are difficult to see steadily for more than a short period, reappear in changed shape, become illusory, vanish; as the poem progresses one finds oneself groping more and more in a world where forms are indistinct but have infinite suggestiveness; the mind creates and re-creates; and at the end one has not so much beheld an experience objectively as lived it in the emotions.
As in so many of Chaucer's poems, the guise of the narrator is important to an interpretation of the work. At the outset this seems to be the familiar one of the unloved servant of the God of Love, the man whose inexperience renders him singularly ill-fitted to write a romance, but who will nevertheless perform the pious act of translating—of all things!—an unhappy love story. As in the Parliament of Fowls, the value of love within the poem is heightened by the narrator's exclusion from it, his yearning toward it. But this lyrical function of the narrator is in Troilus less important than his dual, paradoxical function as a historian whose knowledge of the story is wholly book-derived and as an invisible yet omnipresent participant in the action. It is as a historian that he first presents himself—a rather fussy, nervous scholar who has got hold of some old books, particularly one by Lollius, that tell the story of the Trojan lovers. This he means to translate, although he complains that his sources fail to give as much information as they ought. Nevertheless, they present the essentials: the sorrow Troilus suffered before he won Criseide, and how she forsook him in the end (Bk. I). Starting out with such inadequate and unpromising data, the historian proceeds to recreate the story as if he himself were living it without knowing its outcome. His second guise, that of the participant, unlike the guise of the historian, is largely implicit, a matter of the emotional intensity and lack of objectivity with which he approaches the characters. As the poem proceeds, the tension between the two attitudes, the historian dealing with incontrovertible fact, the participant speaking from equally incontrovertible emotional experience, increases until it becomes almost unendurable. By the beginning of Book IV the narrator's love for Criseide has become such that when he finds himself forced to face the issue of her perfidy he comes close to denying the truth of his old books. For how Criseide Troilus forsook, he begins, forthrightly enough; but reluctance to credit the bare statement causes him to soften it:
Or at the leeste, how that she was unkinde,
Moot hennesforth been matere of my book,
As writen folk thurgh which it is in minde:
Allas that they sholde evere cause finde
To speke hire harm—and if they on hire lie,
Ywis, hemself sholde han the vilainye.
It is a strange historian who becomes so emotionally involved with the personages of his history that he is willing to impugn the reliability of the sources upon which his whole knowledge of those personages presumably depends.
These two divergent attitudes of the narrator come to form an image of the philosophical speculation that permeates much of the poem: is it possible in this world to maintain a single firm idea of the reality of any given human situation or character? This speculation may be best illustrated in its bearing on Criseide, upon whom so much of the emotional force of the poem centers. History records the literal fact that Criseide proved, in the end, unworthy of the love Troilus bore her. This is the flattest, most basic, and least assailable of realities. (At the time Chaucer was writing, Criseide's character may not yet have suffered the deterioration that, by Shakespeare's time, made her a kind of literary model of the unfaithful woman; nevertheless Chaucer's method of handling her is essentially what it would have been if the process had already taken place.) Despite our knowledge of the ending, the narrator's loving presentation of Criseide in the course of the poem makes us feel the powerful attraction that brought about Troilus' love; and we are even persuaded that she was worthy of it. Indeed, Troilus gains something of the poignancy of the elegy by the very fact that we are aware of Criseide's eventual perfidy at the same time the narrator is depicting the profound spell she casts—just as we know that Blanche, in the Book of the Duchess, is dead even while the Black Knight describes the charm of her vitality. History tends to pronounce judgment on the final perfidy of Criseide as effectively nullifying her positive worth as a human being; but the historical point of view does not exhaust the reality of Criseide as the heroine of the poem.
It is true that at the end of the poem we are left with two widely different versions of Criseide's reality, versions made mutually exclusive by the conventions of romance. These conventions make it impossible for a heroine worthy of love to prove faithless; and ultimately we must, of course, bow to the fact of her faithlessness. We must remember, however, that it was Chaucer's aim to make the reader suffer vicariously the experience of Troilus. The poet therefore creates in the person of Criseide one of the most alluring of heroines; and more, he persuades us that her downfall does not so much falsify our first judgment of her as compel us to see the tragic nature of reality, in which the best so often becomes the worst.
Criseide's most emphatically displayed characteristic is amiability—that is, lovability: she has almost all the qualities that men might hope to encounter in their first loves. This is perhaps the same as saying that she is above all feminine, suggesting for a young man like Troilus the compelling mystery and challenge of her sex. She is lovely in appearance, demure yet self-possessed, capable of both gaiety and gravity, glamorous in the truest sense of the word. Although she says nothing really witty, she responds to Pandarus' wit in such a way as to seem witty; her constant awareness of implications beneath the surface of the situation suggests, if it does not prove, intelligence. With her uncle and with Troilus she has the curiously endearing charm that arises from her consciousness, humorously and wryly expressed, of her own complicity in the events that befall her. The grace and tenderness with which she finally yields to Troilus (Bk. III) are almost magically appealing.
But Chaucer did something more than present Criseide as the completely agreeable heroine; he also suggested in her a really complex human being, filled with all sorts of latent qualities which are much more than mere enhancements of her magnetism. Chaucer's presentation, indeed, is so full as to invite his readers to find in Criseide the seeds of her eventual falseness; but Criseide's potentialities as a human being, so brilliantly sketched as partly to justify calling Troilus a psychological novel, elude us in the end. Several excellent critics have purported to find in this or that one of her qualities the definitive clue to her betrayal, but others continue to feel that the mainsprings of her action lie hidden. It seems to follow that if the poet were trying to make her motivation psychologically clear, he failed badly. It is, however, certain that this was not his purpose. Instead, he meant to present in Criseide a broad range of the undefined but recognizable potentialities inherent in human nature.
Our longest and seemingly most penetrating view into Criseide's character is afforded by Book II, when we are shown her reactions to the news her uncle brings her about Troilus' love. These reactions are filled with apparent clues to her basic character, but when analyzed they lead to the ambiguous conclusions. Criseide is much concerned with Troilus' high estate as a prince of Troy, and this concern might be interpreted as indicative of opportunism; conversely, because her already precarious situation in the city might make it dangerous to refuse him, her concern might be interpreted as fearfulness. If the fact of her concern, regardless of what it springs from, is taken as an indication of an overcalculating nature, then the impression is counterbalanced by her involuntary moment of intoxication when she sees Troilus, in all his martial glory, riding homeward from battle. This incident in turn might suggest an oversensual nature; but the circumspection with which, a little later, she considers the whole affair might well reinforce an impression of her frigidity. Again, her inability to make up her mind might be taken to prove her indecisiveness and ineffectuality; on the other hand, since the problems she is facing are entirely realistic, it might be used to prove her native practicality.
The narrator is of singularly little assistance to the reader who is trying to solve the enigma. On every crucial psychological issue both he and his old books are silent. We do not know, though we may suspect, what Criseide thought when Pandarus told her Troilus was out of town the day she came to dine. We never know to what extent she was influenced by her uncle's specious, often self-contradictory, arguments. And the narrator's explanations are even worse than his silences. For instance, just after Criseide experiences the moment of intoxication mentioned above, the narrator pauses to consider the hypothetical objection of some envious person that she was falling in love too fast (Bk. II). With a fine show of indignation he protests that she did not fall in love immediately: she merely began to incline toward Troilus, who had to win her with long service. The effect of this kind of explanation—of which there are a number in the poem—is complex, not to say chaotic. The reader, who may never have thought that Criseide is proceeding too fast, is suddenly encouraged to think she is by the narrator's gratuitous denial. The reader is made, as it were, an involuntary critic of the action instead of a mere spectator. Moreover, he is made to judge Criseide according to a norm that the narrator's tone assumes to be well known but that is in fact undefined and totally unknown, namely, the decorous rate of speed with which a woman should fall in love. Finally, having cleared Criseide of a charge which only he has made, the narrator asserts, in the very next stanza, that it was not her fault but Troilus' destiny that she should fall in love with him so soon. Analyzed by the intellect alone, the passage seems to suggest that Criseide did fall in love too quickly. Yet it precedes the far longer one in which she considers the whole matter so carefully that some critics have accused her of proceeding too deliberately!
The fact is that we do not read poetry with the intellect alone, and that when poetry makes two contradictory statements they do not cancel each other out. Both remain as part of the essential poetic truth, which is not the same thing at all as logic. There is surely no abstract, logical, ideal course of action for a woman falling in love, but we can recognize the process as being truly represented by Criseide. Some parts of her nature are driving her forward with a speed that is utterly terrifying to the rest of her nature, and a bewildering variety of motives assert themselves in turn. But however we analyze these, in the long run we can say with assurance only that they are human. Any one of them, given a development which the poem resolutely refuses to permit, might become the reason for her eventual betrayal: mere timidity, mere opportunism, mere sensuality, mere inefficiency—even mere femininity. As it stands, however, we are emotionally no more prepared for the denouement than Troilus, though we have had one important advantage over him: we have been permitted to see, and have been disturbed by, suggestions of depths in Criseide that her lover could not have seen. Our confidence in her is less serene, particularly as a result of the narrator's reassurances. It may be that her very elusiveness makes us nervous. If so, that is as it should be, since the only possible resolution of the two realities mentioned earlier lies in the unpredictability, the instability, of even the most lovely of mortal women.
Just as in later literature Criseide was to become the type of a faithless woman, so her charming, witty, intelligent uncle Pandarus was, by a worse fate, to become the type of a pimp. In a long conversation in Book III Pandarus and Troilus discuss, among other things, the implications of Pandarus' helping Troilus win Criseide. The conclusion they come to is less than satisfactory: Pandarus' help is not the act of a procurer because he receives no reward for it. Thereafter the matter is not one of the overt issues of the poem, though in his last speech to Troilus Pandarus reverts to it almost as if he foresaw the deterioration of his name Pandar to pander. And while not overt, the issue once raised can never be wholly banished from the mind. Parallel to the question the poem raises about Criseide, "Is her reality that of a worthy lover or that of an unfaithful wench?" is the question it raises about Pandarus' assistance of Troilus: "Is this the action of a loyal friend or of a mere pimp?"
History—in this case later literary history—has answered the question to the detriment of Pandarus, but the answer this poem gives is less absolute. The reader is assured by everyone—by Troilus, by Pandarus himself, by the narrator—that what Pandarus does is done wholly because of his devotion to Troilus, and surely the moralist must admit that human action is qualified by the motives of the agent. Yet, just as was the case with Criseide, when we watch his character in action we seem to glimpse potentials—undefined, to be sure—that are not of a piece with the notion of a friend acting with entire altruism. In general he seems, like his niece, a person of great charm: gay, cheerful, witty, mocking and self-mocking, friendly, helpful, practical, intelligent, sympathetic, loyal—one could hardly wish for a better companion or friend. But despite these qualities, one's confidence in him does not remain altogether secure. Perhaps his pleasure in arranging this affair is too great. The brilliant comedy he performs at the lovers' bedside—a touch of the "Miller's Tale"—is perhaps suggestive of some vital flaw in his nature (and the narrator does nothing to improve the situation by failing to send Pandarus off to his own chamber). Even the delightful scene of Pandarus' visit to Criseide's bedside after Troilus has departed is not without a hint of prurience. In the long run, it maybe said of the complexity of Pandarus, as of the complexity of Criseide, that it displays such a rich array of human qualities that we are at a loss in analyzing his ultimate motives and character.
Pandarus bears a relation to the problem of reality—and hence to the philosophical speculation that is carried on in the poem—in another way. He is what would generally be called today a thoroughgoing realist. Paradoxically, this seems to mean that he has no respect for reality at all. For him, things are whatever one makes them. To accomplish a given action, all one has to do is manipulate the situation so as to produce the proper pressures on the actors. It does not matter in the least if these pressures are in reality non-existent; it only matters that the actors should think them real. In putting his philosophy to work, Pandarus becomes the master-spinner of illusions. A persecutor from whom Criseide needs protection is conjured up out of thin air. A dinner party is manipulated with excruciating attention to detail so that Criseide may be introduced to Troilus under the most respectable of circumstances. When Criseide must be induced to receive Troilus in her bedchamber, a rival lover named Horaste, whom Criseide had never smiled upon and Troilus had never felt jealous of, emerges full-blown from Pandarus' fertile mind to produce the necessary pressure. And if Pandarus cannot actually produce rain, his foreknowledge that rain will come serves the magician's purpose of insuring that his dinner guest will stay the night. The love affair itself seems to result largely from the illusions Pandarus creates for the paralyzed Troilus and the passive Criseide. One would not be surprised if he were to dictate Troilus' first letter to Criseide and then to dictate her response, so close does he come to being the author of a living fiction.
Upon the significance of all this illusion-spinning the poem makes no overt comment. It even fails to distinguish clearly between real and illusory pressures exerted on Criseide: for instance, we do not know whether Pandarus' account of his discovering Troilus' love-sicknesses is in the realm of fact or merely a charming invention with which to please Criseide. But in the poem's totality the implications of Pandarus' illusions cannot be avoided, because we know that in the end Criseide's love of Troilus will prove to be a kind of illusion. Moreover, the dominant role the illusions play in the love affair, whether commented on or not, forces them on our consciousness, and once more we experience a sense of insecurity. This is embodied in the poem by the interchange between the lovers when their love is consummated; both of them, especially Troilus, express uncertainty whether such bliss can in fact be true.
Pandarus continues a realist and a would-be manipulator of realities until the end, when reality defeats him. His first reaction on hearing that Criseide must leave the city is that the love affair is finished. He tries to persuade Troilus to give her up, to forget about her, and when that practical approach fails, as it is doomed to, he tries another equally practical one, equally doomed to fail: forcefully to prevent her going. When Troilus replies, with his usual integrity, that he cannot constrain Criseide against her will, Pandarus observes that if Criseide consents to leave Troy, Troilus must consider her false. With this speech—which, incidentally, is the most strikingly revealing of several of Pandarus' reflections on Criseide in the last two books—his effective role in the poem is completed. From then on all he can do is act as go-between. His efforts to rearrange reality in order to preserve the love affair are paltry and futile. After Criseide's departure from Troy we see him upholding Troilus' hopes even when he himself recognizes their futility, and while in the earlier books Pandarus' attempts to uphold illusion did not seem offensive, now they seem the work of a half-hearted trickster. It is almost as if the reality he had tortured were having its revenge on him by redefining his actions as those of a mere procurer: for Criseide, after all, becomes little better than a whore. In the end Pandarus—and Pandarus alone—accepts history's version of Criseide: by saying, in his pathetic last speech, that he hates her, he makes clear that for him any other value she may have seemed to possess has been canceled out. He submits to the ultimate reality as Troilus, who can never "unlove" Criseide, refuses to do; yet one has felt that Pandarus' love for his niece was, in its way, as great as Troilus'.
Troilus, the hero of the poem and the most important of its personages, may seem in some respects less interesting than Pandarus or Criseide. If, however, he lacks their human variety, his trouthe, his integrity, makes him in the long run a more fully realized person. This integrity, the quality that he will not surrender even to keep Criseide with him, is the one human value the poem leaves entirely unquestioned: it is because of it that Troilus is granted his ultimate vision. It places him, of course, in sharp contrast with Criseide and her untrouthe, and since one of the meanings of trouthe is reality, he emerges as more real than she. The sad fact that integrity does him no practical good does not in any way impair its value; indeed, its value seems enhanced by its preventing him, at least on one occasion, from attaining an apparent good. If he had been a different person—a Diomede, for instance—he might well have used force to stop Criseide's exchange. This is what Pandarus advises and what both narrator and reader momentarily find themselves hoping for. But Troilus is acutely aware of both the public and the private implications of such an act. Criseide's exchange had been legally determined by the parliament and duly ratified by King Priam, and to prevent it forcefully would be to substitute anarchy for law: the Trojan war had itself been caused by Paris' rape of Queen Helen, and to seize Criseide would be once again to risk precipitating endless violent countermeasures. Furthermore, according to the medieval conventions of courtly love, the lover was the servant of his mistress—as the word mistress still suggests—and for the servant to overrule the mistress was unthinkable. As it frequently does, the courtly convention here merely articulates a real factor in the relationship of civilized men and women. A lover cannot impose his will upon his love, for unless she remains at all times possessed of free will, love itself becomes meaningless and the love affair vitiated. Similarly, to seize her would be inevitably to disclose their love affair and ruin her good name, which, according to the courtly code, he was sworn to protect. In view of these matters, for Troilus to "ravish" Criseide would be for him to violate his own nature, which, as Criseide perceives, is one of moral virtue, grounded upon truth.
But if Troilus is the only unequivocally worthwhile person in the poem, why, one must ask, is he its principal sufferer? Troilus ascribes his misery to the operation of Fortune, or malevolent fate. A heavy atmosphere of fatality does, indeed, hang over the poem, so that even if the reader had not been told the outcome of the love affair he might feel it inevitable that Troilus should in the end fall, like Troy. Yet with one exception all the specific incidents, although the narrator may invoke for them the causality of the stars, seem equally attributable to the action of one of the three actors in the love tragedy. The exception is the intervention of Criseide's forgotten father Calchas, an intervention that comes from his sure foreknowledge of the city's doom and that is beyond the control of Pandarus or the lovers. Elsewhere causality is ambiguous. For instance, the narrator ascribes to astrological influences entirely remote from Criseide's control the rain which prevented Criseide's leaving her uncle's house. On the other hand, we are aware that the rain had been foreseen by Pandarus, so that what may be deemed fate in its relation to Criseide is at the same time mere machination on the part of Pandarus. Nor are we sure enough of Criseide's state of mind in accepting her uncle's invitation—the narrator has been marvelously ambiguous about that too—clearly to exonerate her from an acquiescence in a foreseen fate so prompt as to make fate's role negligible. But here as elsewhere the impression of fatal influence is not canceled out by the impression of human responsibility: both impressions remain and even unite into a single impression poetically truer than either by itself. Similarly, Troilus' failure to prevent Criseide from leaving Troy, while it is the result of his own free will, might still be ascribed to fate, for in order to have stopped her Troilus would have had to be someone other than Troilus, and this he could not be.
In a more universal and more tragic sense, the impossibility of a human being's becoming anything but what he is is one of the principal points—perhaps the principal point—that the poem makes, and it is toward this point that the poem has been steadily moving. The form, as has been said above, is that of a history, the end of which is known, being lived by personages who do not know their end, and presented at times as if neither narrator nor reader knows it. Preoccupied constantly during the presentation with the charm and delight of humanity as represented by Criseide and Pandarus, we can little more believe that things will turn out as they do than can Troilus. The fact that they turn out as they do almost seems, at times, a violation of our idea of reality; within the poem we are now and again apt to ascribe the ending to a malevolent fate which, in order to bring about what it foresees, contorts and constrains events and persons from their natural course. This is the ultimate conclusion of which Troilus is capable in his lifetime. His long soliloquy in Book IV on predestination and free will comes in its tortured circularity to nothing more than a statement that what God has foreseen must be—that free will does not exist. This soliloquy, of course, precedes any suspicion on his part of Criseide's infidelity, so that he is not forced to consider the problem of her free will operating evilly. When suspicions have once occurred, he is no longer able to think even as clearly as he does here, but vacillates pathetically between the two conflicting realities, Criseide's apparently true love and Criseide's faithlessness. His still relatively happy ignorance stops him in his soliloquy from going to the extreme of accusing his god of devising a plot that does not fit its characters; but this is an accusation that occasional readers have, with some reason, made against Chaucer the poet, just as Chaucer the narrator comes close to making it against his old books.
But to the profoundly medieval, profoundly Christian Chaucer there could be no other plot because there could be no other characters. According to some medieval thinkers, the whole duty of the historian was to find in recorded history the image of instability: it is in this sense that the "Monk's Tale" presents history, bad as the tale is. The premise underlying such a definition of history is that natural, fallen man is unstable. Chaucer, while surely not bound to any arbitrary point of view, presents in Troilus and Criseide a pattern of human instability. Criseide is its chief exponent in terms of human character; Pandarus in terms of human action. Troilus comes, because of his trouthe, as near to stability as man may come; but within a world where mutation is the law—and in a world in which the stability of a Christian God does not exist—it does him no good. Given Boethius or Christian doctrine, Troilus might have progressed beyond the point he does in his soliloquy on foreordination. As it is, he concludes where Boethius began in his Consolation of Philosophy, before Philosophy had persuaded him that he must not commit himself wholly and exclusively to this unstable world. Troilus' trouthe is, as has been said above, a real value; but within the terms set by the poem, it must remain only a moral value, imitating one aspect of God, who is Trouthe, but hopelessly limited in other respects. Despite its alternate meaning, reality, it cannot help Troilus perceive ultimate reality, which only God can perceive; conversely, it cannot defend him against illusion—the illusion of Criseide's stability, of the enduring power of human love. It cannot, in short, enable him to see that of all the conflicting realities the poem presents none is in the end real, since compared to the reality of God no earthly substance has reality.
The poem comes to its tragic conclusion by no such bald statement as the above. We have seen how in the ambiguity of the characterization of Criseide and Pandarus there has been, since the beginning, the potential of instability. One might say that in their very elusiveness, their unknowability, resides equally the image of unreality. And we have since the beginning been fully aware of where the story is leading, though our willingness to forget is the product of Chaucer's art. As the poem approaches its climax—or anticlimax—the poet so manipulates us that while we continue our intense involvement with the characters, we begin to see them increasingly in the light of historical generalization. Halfway through the fifth book this manipulation appears most brilliantly. It is the ninth night after Criseide's departure, and we are taken to the Greek camp to see how she is faring with her plots to return to Troy, as she had promised, on the tenth day. Her pathetic soliloquy, so futile, so devoid of resource, so spiritless, leaves us infinitely saddened. The narrator, seemingly in hot pursuit of his story, turns quickly to Diomede, and for a moment we enter that blunt, aggressive, unillusioned mind. Diomede's interior monologue completed, the narrator, as if suddenly recalling his own failure to characterize Diomede earlier, gives us a one stanza pen-portrait of him. And then, by a curious afterthought, he gives a three-stanza description of Criseide and a two-stanza description of Troilus. The quality of these is, contextually, strange in the extreme: they are impersonal, trivial, oversimplified—as if a historian had collected all the information there was about several persons of no special significance and were listing it, not because of its inherent interest, but because the historian's duty is to assemble and preserve any sort of scraps turned up during his research. And indeed these scraps are in a very real sense the oldest historical material relating to the story of Troilus and Criseide, the sparse material from which the full-grown story eventually sprang. Chaucer's source for the portraits is not Boccaccio, but rather a sixth-century narrative of the fall of Troy ascribed to Dares the Phrygian. This book pads out its paltry fiction with brief descriptions of important people concerned with the Trojan war, among them Diomede, Troilus, and Criseide, described just as Chaucer describes them in Book V but still some centuries removed from the relationship later writers were to give them. When, nearing the end of his poem, Chaucer saw that it was time to turn from the guise of the passionately committed participant to the guise of the objective, remote, detached historian, he did so with a vengeance. Perhaps nowhere else in the poem are the two conflicting versions of reality more boldly juxtaposed. Certainly nowhere else is the shock so great as when the historian, having listed a miscellany of Criseide's attributes, some trivial but all agreeable enough, brings the portrait to the muted conclusion:
Tendre-herted, sliding of corage—
But trewely I can nat telle hir age.
Sliding of corage: the simple unemphatic statement of Criseide's instability of heart is not even the climax of the portrait. From the point of view of the realistic historian, human nature is capable only of anticlimax.
The sudden re-emergence of the detached historian at this point in Book V provides a kind of foretaste of the dominant mood in which the poem concludes; but the narrator's other guise continues to reappear whenever Criseide is mentioned. Indeed, Chaucer's manipulation of the two guises, and through them of the reader, is nowhere more adroit than in his handling of Criseide's betrayal. Time and again while the narrative inexorably demonstrates the progress of her infidelity the narrator leaps to her defense, and by the very inadequacy of the defense reinforces the reader's condemnation of her. The most striking instance of this technique occurs after Diomede has visited Criseide on the eleventh day, when she has already broken her promise to Troilus. The interview she has with Diomede is not described; instead the narrator rapidly summarizes all the later history of her amorous dealings with the Greek. And then, having given to the whole history of her treachery the emotional impact of a single action committed in a day or two, he indignantly asserts that while his books are silent on this subject, all this successful wooing by Diomede must have taken a long time! As if this were not enough, he carries us back to Troy to show us Troilus, standing on the walls, still scanning the outlying roads for his beloved. Months of action have rushed by in the Greek camp, but in Troy it is still only the tenth day, the day Criseide is to return.
Thus the poem moves with mounting emotional force to its conclusion. The actual ending of the poem—generally though incorrectly called its epilogue—gathers up with extraordinary effectiveness the many moods and many attitudes which have alternated in the course of the narrative. There is both low and high comedy—and perhaps high truth, too—in the poet's prayer to "every lady bright of hue," that she not blame him for Criseide's faithlessness, and in his baldly illogical claim that he has told the story "not only" that men should beware of women but "mostly" that women should beware of men. There is comedy also in the poet's self-conscious fear that he has failed to make himself clear, that readers will mis-scan his lines and miss his meaning. The works of the great poets of the past with which he fears his "little book" (of more than eight thousand lines) might be compared make him nervous. His successive echoes of the first line of the Aeneid and of the first line of the Iliad suggest that he is afraid he ought to have written not a love poem but a martial epic—if only he were up to it. In any case, may God give him power to write a comedy.
These outbursts of nervousness—which are perhaps a kind of mocking image of man's inability to make sense of the materials his own history provides him—intrude upon the story before it is actually finished, and almost by an afterthought the poet returns to it in order to tell the end of Troilus. Inevitably enough, history does not permit Troilus to kill Diomede or to be killed by him: even that meager satisfaction is denied to our sense of the way things ought to be. Instead, Troilus is killed by Achilles. Only when he has been thus freed from his earthly misery is he rewarded for his earthly fidelity: he is admitted into heaven, a heaven that is physically pagan but theologically Christian. (It is not the first time in medieval literature that trouthe allows a non-Christian to enter into a Christian heaven, for according to both Langland and Dante the same quality had raised to heaven the Emperor Trajan.) From his remote sphere Troilus is granted that vision of the world he lately left which enables him to see in full perspective the pettiness and fragility to which he had committed his being: his trouthe, finally receiving its philosophic extension, is made whole. But Troilus' is not the ultimate vision in the poem. His could come only after his death, but to the Christian reader the vision is possible at all times during his life. In the last lines of the poem Chaucer gathers up all the flickering emotions, the flickering loves with which he has been dealing and unites them into the great harmony of the only true and perfect love. All the conflicting realities and illusions of the old story are subsumed under the one supreme reality.
Thus the conclusion asserts most solemnly the principle—toward which the poem has been steadily moving—that man's nature and his works are and must be unstable and unreal. Some readers are apt to feel, however, that the poet's final statement cancels all the human values which his own loving treatment has made real; that he is, in effect, saying either that he ought not to have written the poem or that the reader ought not to have read it. This feeling is natural enough in view of Chaucer's entirely specific condemnation of all things mortal except man's ability to love God. But it must be borne in mind that the ending is a part of the poem, and no matter how sincere a statement it is on the part of the poet, the ending combines with all the other parts of the poem to produce the poem's own ultimate meaning. As has been said before, nothing a poet writes is ever canceled out by anything else he writes, and both the haunting loveliness of the story of Troilus and Criseide and the necessity of rejecting it remain valid for the reader. And also, one may suppose, for Chaucer. For the lines in which he condemns the world—
… and thinketh al nis but a faire,
This world that passeth soone as flowres faire—
poignantly enhance the very thing that he is repudiating. It is in the quality of these lines, taken as an epitome of the quality of the whole poem, that the ultimate meaning of Troilus lies. The simultaneous awareness of the real validity of human values—and hence our need to commit ourselves to them—and of their inevitable transitoriness—and hence our need to remain uncommitted—represents a complex, mature, truly tragic vision of mankind. The prayer of the poem's last stanza suggests the poet's faith that his vision is also subsumed under the vision of the Author of all things.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.