SOURCE: "The Satiric Pattern of The Canterbury Tales," in Six Satirists, edited by Beekman W. Cottrell et ai, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1965, pp. 17-34.

Suppose we put to ourselves this question: To what extent, precisely, are the Canterbury Tales a work of satire? From one point of view we might answer the question very easily, simply by running through the Tales collecting an exhibit of disengaged passages and episodes which strike us as obviously satiric. But suppose we put the question this way: To what extent are the Canterbury Tales as a whole a work of satire? We now face difficulties, at least two of them, which we did not have as long as we considered the Tales only a collection of bits and pieces.

The first difficulty is that in fact the Tales are a collection of bits and pieces. What we have are nine fragments of a structure which Chaucer drew up plans for but which, whether because of weariness, boredom, or death, he never finished. We are not sure how these particular pieces were meant to fit in, nor how Chaucer might have changed their shape as he worried them into place. On the other hand, everyone knows what his overall plan was. Now when a writer, after trotting out thirty characters in a row, informs us that we are about to hear 120 short stories, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the thirty narrators are merely glue to hold the stories together, that telling the stories themselves is what he really wants to do. Again, even in the light of Chaucer's overall plan, we seem to be dealing with fragments. If in this sense we are dealing with a collection of fragments, then the question we started out from is idle, for such a collection is not very susceptible to being talked about as a whole. Fortunately for our enterprise, it is now generally agreed that Chaucer's plan was more ambitious than we might at first glance suppose. Refusing to content himself with a perfunctory framework, he apparently hoped so to With this critical backing, then, we may go ahead on the assumption that it is not entirely idle to talk about the nature of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, even though our conception of that whole must always remain hypothetical.

Our second difficulty becomes clear when we review the variety of the fragments we do have. They range from earthy, uproarious farce through sophisticated burlesque, religious and romantic idealism, to superb melodrama. No tales in the collection are more uproariously funny than the fabliaux. Four of them find the thread of their plots in the clever tricks by which a young bachelor manages to seduce another man's wife. Ordinarily we might take this somewhat seriously, but in Chaucer's tales the characters themselves are not deeply involved emotionally in the event—though of course they are involved in less'profound ways; equally important, the plot of each tale becomes such a magnificently intricate machine for discomfiting certain of the characters that we lose our sense of reality in watching it work itself out.

An instructive contrast with the fabliaux is the "Franklin's Tale." Here too a handsome young fellow wants to seduce another man's wife. But the young fellow is a squire, the husband a knight, and his wife a noble lady. Adultery is important to these people, not because their emotions are deeply involved, but because their ideals of behavior are. Consequently, even though the squire calls in a magician to remove all the rocks from the coast of Brittany, he cannot bring himself, his prize in his grasp, to act less nobly than he should. The event does not occur and all the characters leave the stage feeling very noble indeed. We are now clearly into the realm of ideals: knights and squires, great ladies and beautiful damsels, magnificent tournaments and undying, unrequited love. On the whole, Chaucer asks us to take the tales which deal with these matters with some seriousness, but in the unfinished "Sir Topaz," he gives us an amusing burlesque of their preposterous aspects.

Chaucer adopts a more consistently serious tone in the tales which celebrate Christian faith and related virtues. The plot pattern of these tales is a simple and familiar one: in each, a heroine—all the protagonists are women except one, who is a small boy—a heroine of saint-like perfection undergoes a terrible trial of her faith or virtue. These do not desert her and her cause emerges triumphant, either because of her own actions or because of the miraculous intervention of Heaven. No doubt for us these tales seem in many ways bigoted, violent, naive. But they also express the passionate faith and the intense morality—at least on the theoretical level—so often to be found in the Middle Ages. In the "Parson's Tale" and the "Tale of Melibee" Chaucer gives us a more reasonable and discriminating expression of these characteristics—and a duller one. Neither is really a story at all. There is a good deal of hard-headed worldly wisdom in the Melibee, and several of the other Canterbury tales are of the sort often used to illustrate and teach such wisdom. For instance, both the "Manciple's" and the "Nun's Priest's" tales are at bottom fables, like Aesop's fables, the characters animals whose small adventures point a moral.

These are the Canterbury Tales, and the difficulty is clear enough. When we put the label satire under Gulliver's Travels we are allowed to go our ways in peace, for Gulliver's Travels is one of the things everyone means when he talks about satire. But when, after looking at the miscellany I have sketched above, we put the question whether this is satire, we come face to face not only with the problem of defining the nature of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, insofar as we can, but also withthe problem of defining the farthest outskirts of meaning in our term. I would be happier if we could skirt the maze of definition in this corner of the critical garden, but we cannot. Unless we establish a few elementary distinctions we will not reach any conclusion at all. "Satire," Northrop Frye asserts in his broadly based Anatomy of Criticism, as useful a book for matters of this sort as we will find, "satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. Sheer invective or name-calling … is satire in which there is relatively little irony: on the other hand, whenever a reader is not sure what the author's attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire." Frye has gone directly to the center of the maze, for if it is difficult to define satire, a reader of current literary criticism may be pardoned for feeling that it is impossible to define irony. But let us try. Perhaps, if we keep matters as basic and as simple as possible, we can find the distinctions we need.

One distinction sometimes made by the better college textbooks—and not made often enough by professional critics—is that between irony of language and irony of situation. If I happen to see a truck driver, his face distorted with brute fury, swearing and gesturing at a traffic officer, and if I turn to a companion and say, "There's pretty fellow," I am using irony of language: the meaning of the words I use does not fit the object we both see in front of us. Suppose, then, that as the officer, ready to give as good as he got, walks over to the truck driver, there arrives on the scene a little old lady thrusting up a massive poster: "Have You Made Your Peace With God?" It may strike me that the little old lady and the two men, though they are all situated on the same streetcorner, are not really operating in the same world, and if it does so strike me, I am aware of irony in the situation.

The above distinction may seem an unimpressive one, but no other is as fundamental, whether we think in terms of the history of literary criticism or of the theory of literary structure. Irony of language arises out of the interaction between two of the levels of any literary structure: the verbal level and the level that is often called the world created in our imaginations. Irony of situation, on the other hand, arises out of the interaction between two elements at the world level, and it need not depend any more on the verbal level than does any other element in the imagined world. Again, when we turn to the history of literary terms, we find that before the late eighteenth century, the word irony was virtually always used to mean irony of language. Irony of situation, as a meaning available in the word irony itself, seems to be the invention of the last two centuries.

If this distinction is fundamental, it ought to lead us to some useful observations, and I think it does. Let us examine three.

(1) If we have a solid historical understanding of a literary text, solid in relation to the author, the language, and the cultural milieu, we can say with some certainty whether and where that text exhibits irony of language. We know what the author means by the words he uses, and the world to which these words correspond or do not correspond, complex as it may be, is in front of us. Of course there are borderline cases, but they are borderline because our historical understanding of the text is not fine enough. On the other hand, we cannot say with the same kind of certainty whether a given text "contains" irony of situation. The reason is simply that here a good deal depends on the reader's "philosophy of life," to use a handy phrase. Every teacher has, at one time or another, been obliged to tell his students that there is an ironic conflict in the world of a Hardy poem, a conflict which Hardy "put into" the poem, and teachers of the metaphysical poets are nowadays obliged to warn students that Donne probablydid not "put into" his poems all the ironic conflicts which critics of a few years ago were determined to see there. But suppose a "world picture" or an author's personal "world view" does not control us? Then everything depends on the point of view—the reader's point of view. For the extreme Platonist who thinks the world ought to be one clear, unbroken light, everything except a blank mirror is riddled with irony. This explains why it is so easy for graduate students and other industrious critics to turn out paper after paper on "Irony in——."

The above observation may also help us to a convenient name for the irony of situation. Verbal irony is an accurate and widely accepted name for many of the ironies of language; I intend to use it to cover all of them. When we want to talk about the irony of situation, however, we are confronted with a number of terms that are either too narrow or too broad: Socratic irony, Sophoclean irony, dramatic irony, irony of fate, cosmic irony, philosophic irony, and worst of all, the word irony without a modifier—a popular usage which confuses the whole issue. Since the term Philosophic irony has had some currency, since it has narrowed the meaning in the direction we want to go, and since the irony of situation does in fact depend on the philosophic angle from which a situation is viewed, I intend to adopt that term to cover all the ironies except verbal ones.

(2) In his analysis of the ironic mode, to return to Northrop Frye for a moment, he points out that the writer who specializes in this mode generally presents his ironic world without comment. That is, he employs philosophic irony but not verbal irony. In the broad historical categories Frye works in, this is probably true enough, but we should not go on to suppose that there is a necessary antagonism between verbal and philosophic irony. They may coexist in all sorts of ways, and it is perhaps worth saying that only some of these ways have been usefully explored, in, for instance, studies of dramatic and Socratic irony.

(3) Finally, to make the last of our three observations, we can say that verbal irony is always used at least partly for the purposes of satire or, much less frequently, of compliment; philosophic irony, on the other hand, may be used for the purposes of satire or it may not. And this brings us, at last, back to Chaucer.

What I wish to do, now that some of the ground has been cleared, is to examine certain aspects of irony in the Canterbury Tales, aspects which will exhibit several of the basic kinds of verbal and philosophic irony both in Chaucer and in general, and having done this, I will return to our initial question. Let us begin with the "Pardoner's Tale."

It is the time of the plague when thousands are dying. Three young men, drunk and riotous, hear the hand-bell clink as a coffin is borne past the tavern on the way to church. "Whose corpse is in that coffin passing by?" one of the men calls to the serving lad. "He was a friend of yours," is the answer; "a privy thief, they call him Death … speared him through the heart…." The youths are infuriated. Inquiring where Death lives, they set out in a rush to kill him. On their way they meet an old man, one of the most ambiguous and haunting figures in English literature. He is not eager to give directions, but when they insist he points to a grove of trees where, he says, Death is waiting. For us the warning is clear, of course, but the drunken youths cannot grasp it. What they find under the tree is a great pile of gold. Visions of endless wealth and pleasure fill their minds; death is forgotten. One runs eagerly into town to fetch bread and wine while the other two stay to guard the gold—and to plot the death of their absent friend. Knowing this, we follow the third youth into an apothecary's shop. "Sell me some poison," he says, "I have a lot of rats I want to kill … I'll get even … with vermin that destroy a man by night." We think at once of his two comrades waiting, weapons in hand, under the tree, but he, of course, is all unconscious of the sinister meaning in his excuse. When he returns to his comrades, his wine bottles filled with poison, they murder him. "Now for a drink. Sit down and let's be merry," one of the murderers says. And Chaucer has him add, "For later on there'll be the corpse to bury." And he drinks the poisoned wine.

What we have here in the "Pardoner's Tale" is the pattern of ironies sometimes called Sophoclean, sometimes dramatic, sometimes a combination of dramatic irony and the irony of fate. But let us analyze the pattern in our own terms. The dominant irony is philosophic, and so plain I don't suppose anyone would doubt that Chaucer put it in. The chief characters set out to find happiness, first by seeking the death of Death, then by pursuing the glorious life a pile of gold is reputed to bring. All their efforts lead only to the grave. Some readers, possibly, feel "the mockery which our ultimate achievement casts on rosy expectations," to quote Robert K. Root, but I do not myself think that the weight of the irony falls in quite this direction. The wages of sin is death: events turn out ironically because the supernal powers are moral powers and the aspirations of the three youths are sinful. If satire is militant irony in which the moral norms are clear, then the "Pardoner's Tale" is, surely, to some extent satiric. It becomes more certainly so if one feels, as I do, that the young men's inability to grasp life by the right handle makes them seem rather stupid, even in places grotesque, a feeling that may come from the way Chaucer mixes realism and allegory in this particular story.

At the verbal level of this tale there are several ironies like "For later on there'll be the corpse to bury." When the Old Man advises the three youths that they will find Death under a tree, his statement conflicts with the actual fact, for they find gold there, and in its second meaning it conflicts with the view of the situation taken by the youths: they cannot see death in the gold. It is perfectly true, of course, that in this second sense the statement accurately reflects the ultimate turn of events and that we as the audience should suspect this, but we are not, after all, part of the world of the tale, and if the three youths, who are part of that world, could see the truth in the statement, it would immediately cease to be ironic. From the point of view of dramatic effect, however, an important function of these verbal ironies is to bring into focus for the audience the whole dramatic shock of the ironic situation, which for a startled moment we see in all clarity. We may even find a parallel to the duplicity of the events in the duplicity of the language.

Verbal ironies of this sort have also their independent effect, aside from underlining the philosophic irony, and here, as elsewhere, it is satiric, for no character can survive the unrecognized passage of a meaning over his head without incurring some loss. The reader inevitably convicts him of general stupidity, moral stupidity, a wrong view of life, a wrong view of himself, or whatever. In the 'Tardoner's Tale," the three roisterers seem to be convicted not only of moral obtuseness but of a certain stupid, though superficially shrewd, vulgarity, and at times there is even an element of grotesque comedy in the tone, though that is on the whole not, we would agree, comic. In this tale, then, verbal and philosophic irony are working together to reach the same satiric ends. And we can probably say that although the philosophic irony could exist alone, it is not easy to see how the verbal irony could; its philosophic basis in this case is essential.

We might now pursue the sort of analysis we have just made through a number of the Canterbury tales, and perhaps it would be a profitable thing to do. No doubt we would find considerable variety, as I suggested in my review of the tales at the beginning of this essay, variety in the importance of the part, if any, which satiric ironies play, variety in the tone they are given, and even variety in the norms the stories appeal to. But if I may take this variety for granted, I would like to turn now not to further analysis of individual tales but to our image of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, an image in which the tales are parts of a larger pattern. From this point of view, I suspect, the exact nature of the various tales will not be so important as the fact that they are various, and we will also see more directly some kind of answer to our initial question.

We recall that some thirty people are making the pilgrimage. Obviously there is opportunity for all sorts of tension and excitement in a group like this. At the beginning things go quietly. It is a bright April morning and the pilgrims have ambled as far as St. Thomas's wateringplace. For the first story our Host turns to the Knight, who recounts a tale of chivalry and romantic love. All the pilgrims, especially the gentlefolk, agree it is a noble story. "Come on, Sir Monk," says the Host, now it is your turn. But by this time the Miller is very drunk, "straddled on his horse, half-on, half-off, and in no mood for manners." He is determined to tell a very funny story about an old carpenter and his wife. At this the Reeve, who is himself a carpenter and not young, looks up to shout, "Give over with your drunken harlotry." But nothing will stop the Miller, who tells his riotous tale to the amusement of nearly everyone. The Reeve, however, is still angry. I'll pay you back for that story, he says, and proceeds to tell a fabliau about how a miller's eye was bleared. This so amuses the Cook, who claws his back for joy, that he asks leave to tell a little joke that occurred in his city, and we get still a third fabliau. So the first fragment ends.

The second begins with a tale of Christian virtue and fortitude told, perhaps surprisingly, by the Man-of-Law, who does not strike us as an especially devout person. Thinking to preserve the decorous tone, our Host, with his habitual harmless profanity, asks the Parson for a tale, whereupon the Parson reproves him for swearing. "Ho! … I smell a Lollard in the wind," exclaims the Host, at which the Shipman starts. There will be no heretical preaching while he is around, he exclaims. "My jolly body has a tale to tell!" And he swings into a fabliau. He is followed by the Prioress, who as a virgin dedicated to the Church quite appropriately tells a story celebrating the miracle of the Virgin. Soberness descends upon the crowd. Hoping to shake them up again the Host turns to Chaucer, poking fun at Chaucer's plump, well-padded figure and his elvish silence. Without anger Chaucer begins the "Tale of Sir Topaz." Suddenly the Host breaks in: "No more of this for God's dear dignity!" he exclaims; "My ears are aching from your frowsty story!" Chaucer is mildly offended, but acquiesces and now tells the prose Tale of Melibee. In this Dame Prudence, a remarkably wise woman and wife, argues that husbands should trust their wives and follow their advice. Much struck by Dame Prudence, the Host describes for his fellow pilgrims his own battling shrew of a wife. In fact the question whether husband or wife should rule the roost seems a sore one for a number of pilgrims, for when his turn comes the Nun's Priest, who works under the thumb of a woman, goes out of his way to illustrate how misleading women's advice really is. The Wife of Bath determinedly reasserts wives' prerogatives, and in passing takes a dig at all clerks like the Priest. Each in his turn—the Clerk, the Merchant, the Squire and the Franklin—all, directly or indirectly through the tales they tell, have something to say on this interesting subject. And so the procession moves on amidst quarrels and sudden friendships, jokes, and unexpected revelations. Itis the unpredictable, confusing, characteristic human chaos, and as we move along with it we gradually become aware of a unity in the Canterbury Tales.

In modern English—or American—life probably nothing except an air-raid shelter would gather into one group, a group with a common purpose, such a diverse collection of individuals as were the Canterbury pilgrims. But medieval religion was accepted as solid fact by everyone, the Miller and the Reeve as well as the Prioress and the Parson. In observing its rites everyone felt himself a member of one community. Chaucer does not in fact represent everyone among his pilgrims, but so diverse are the social types he does represent that he gives us the impression almost of a complete society joined in pilgrimage. As we watch it move along the road across southern England, there grows up in us the sense of a longer pilgrimage moving toward another goal, a goal of which Canterbury is the local symbol.

But I have said nothing of another element which also brings unity and something more to the unfinished Tales. I am thinking of the role played by their narrator, the pilgrim Chaucer. We have been talking as though the Canterbury Tales were a play the author of which never appears, but in fact when the poem begins the first character we meet is Chaucer himself. As W. W. Lawrence says, he takes us into his confidence at once, as though we were "dear and intimate friend[s], from whom he will keep no secrets and whom he will never willingly deceive——." It all happened, Chaucer begins, exactly as I will tell you, for I was there:

So obviously candid and unpremeditated are his words, so almost naive, that we trust him at once. Here is a fellow who will indeed tell us what happened; he has not the self-consciousness to distort and color things.

"While I have time and space," he goes on, let me describe the other pilgrims. He begins with the Knight, his son the Squire, and their servant the Yeoman, and clearly he admires them all. "A most distinguished man … a true, perfect knight," he says, and his son was just what a fine young squire should be, handsome, brave and strong, courteous, "a lad of fire." All the facts he gives us confirm his judgment. Here, indeed, were admirable people. As he turns now to the Prioress, her too he finds admirable. She never, he points out, swore any oath worse than "By St. Loy," who, we know, had been a remarkably diplomatic, courteous, and handsome saint. She spoke extremely dainty French, in the manner of the English school at Stratford, and her manners were exquisite. She was always "straining to counterfeit a courtly kind of grace." Especially appealing was her tender-heartedness; if she saw a mouse in a trap or a dog beaten she would burst into tears. And finally, he says, she wore a bright golden brooch on which was engraved, "Love conquers all." For the first time we hesitate, somehow, to concur with the judgment of our honest guide. His prioress sounds very charming, yes, but there is a note of affectation about her, and we pause for a moment over the question whether a prioress, who devotes her life to religion and the education of young girls, ought to swear at all, even by so nice a saint as St. Loy. We are bothered too by her straining after courtly graces when she has in a sense rejected the worldly court. Should she not weep for the sorrows of men, rather than for those of small mice and mistreated puppies?—But we are being overcritical. We are breaking this gracious woman on the wheel of large ethical and social standards she had not the slightest intention of offending against. Still, a hint of doubt remains as we turn to the Monk.

Here, certainly, there can be no doubt. Our guide is all enthusiasm. "A manly man," he says of the Monk, "fit to be an Abbot," fit really to be exhibited as the paragon of monks: plump, bright-eyed, full of the zest of life. He loved good food and hunting, owned a fine horse and greyhounds swift as birds. His monk's garb was the finest to be had, trimmed with the most expensive fur in the country, the hood fastened with a gold pin in the shape of a lover's knot. As for studying old books, working the land, turning his back upon worldly temptations and riches, as St. Benedict and St. Augustine require of monks, he rejected them all as old-fashioned notions. "And," our honest Chaucer relates,

I said I agreed with his opinion;
What! Study until reason lost dominion
Poring on books in cloisters? Must he toil
As Austin bade and till the very soil?
Was he to leave the world upon the shelf?
Let Austin have his labor to himself.

Is this our admirable Chaucer speaking? Surely he is not taken in by such arrogant hypocrisy. Even as practical, hard-headed men of the world we expect the proprieties to be observed. A man of God should at least pretend a little. This fellow openly flouts the very doctrines he is expected to live by. And here is Chaucer praising him, even going him one step better! Honest as our guide seems to be, we begin to suspect him of gullibility, and the further we read the stronger our suspicion becomes. Apparently he accepts everything. He accords the same praise, the same objectivity, to the most flagrant cheats and liars among the pilgrims as he does to the most upright and conscientious of them. In fact, the worse they are the more enthusiastic he becomes.

He does have, however, one redeeming trait. As you will understand, he says, "I'm short of wit," and we are happy to see that he recognizes this handicap. When later in the pilgrimage the lawyer speaks slightingly of Chaucer's poetry, Chaucer himself very sensibly keeps quiet, and when the Host pokes fun at his plumpness and shyness, he replies:

"Host, … I hope you are not one
To take it in bad part if I'm a dunce;
I know only a rhyme which, for the nonce,
I learnt."

And he recites the hilariously bad "Rime of Sir Topaz," so bad that the Host stops him in exasperation. Well, we think, it is awful stuff if you take it seriously, but at the same time it very cleverly exaggerates and thereby reveals what is wrong with the worst metrical romances. Perhaps the Host is a little obtuse not to see this. But Chaucer seems totally unaware that he has beguiled the Host into betraying himself.

This, then, is our pilgrim Chaucer. Virginia Woolf catches his character exactly. As his simple, friendly, ingenuous narrative proceeds, suddenly, she says, "out from behind peeps the face of Chaucer, grinning, malicious, in league with all foxes, donkeys, and hens … witty, intellectual, French, at the same time based upon a broad bottom of English humor." The game he plays is as old as Socrates and the eiron of Greek comedy. "What a very stupid fellow I am," these mockers tell us, "but my friend here is most admirable, most admirable indeed. You can see that for yourself." And as they turn the searchlight of their praise on this character or that, every wart, wrinkle, and blemish is exposed by the merciless glare, and woe unto those who are not, indeed, praiseworthy.

Let us stand back, now, from this character and this scene, and see what in general we have. We have, first, two groups of verbal ironies: Chaucer's comments and verbal performances which misrepresent himself; his comments which misrepresent the other pilgrims. Few of these are doubtful. Nothing we know of Chaucer allows us to accept him as "short of wit," and nothing we know of fourteenth century norms allows us to accept the Monk as genuinely "fit to be an abbot." Both groups of ironies function satirically in two ways. They both force us to take a hard look at the actual nature of the object: at Chaucer's delightful sophistication, at the Monk's hard-boiled worldliness; and they both hold up to ridicule the characters over whose heads the ironies pass unrecognized; Harry Bailey is caught flat-footed by Sir Topaz, and the Monk by Chaucer's praise. The norms applied throughout are definite and positive, the norms of Geoffrey Chaucer's sensitive intelligence, both moral and artistic: the Monk is wrong, and Harry Bailey is wrong.

The verbal ironies have also an effect similar to that we observed in the "Pardoner's Tale." Quite early in the "Prologue," I would say, we become aware of the part we must play in Chaucer's game—when he agrees so heartily with the Monk, to be exact. Now that we know our author is capable of sly irony, we read on looking for other ironies, and so often do we find them that by the time we end the "Prologue," our suspicions are aroused by every incongruity, we are hounds sniffing after the slightest scent of a quarry. Thus Chaucer, by lighting a fire under our critical faculties, illuminates the whole world of the Canterbury Tales. After the Prologue, he himself, as author or as pilgrim, seldom appears, but we are never quite able to lose ourselves in the fictional world he creates. Having alerted us, he is now able to disappear into this world, offering it to us without open comment and with apparent fidelity to the characters and limitations of his people, but we, if ever we are tempted to accept these people uncritically, on their own terms, are brought up sharp by a malicious little smile on Chaucer's good-natured face.

It is tempting to see Chaucer as a writer in Northrop Frye's ironic mode, a writer who in fact does present his world without comment. But such a view is mistaken. I have pointed out some of the verbal ironies through which Chaucer judges his world, and although it is true that he more often than not seems to disappear, that he presents his characters with apparent fidelity to their natures, if we recall the burlesque exaggeration of Sir Topaz, of the "Nun's Priest's Tale," of the Wife of Bath, we realize that very often he does not in fact disappear, does not present his people with strict fidelity to their natures, but simply finds a subtler form of verbal irony to serve as vehicle for his satiric judgments. And even when he genuinely withdraws, it takes a while, as I have suggested, for the critical faculties of his audience to run down.

Let us examine now what we have in the way of philosophic ironies. We notice first that there are a number which are of a familiar and obviously satiric nature, analogous, perhaps, to the kind we found in the "Pardoner's Tale." An instance we can be certain of is the Pardoner himself: he preaches magnificently against the very vice he himself is most passionately found of. The ironic conflict here makes a satiric comment on the Pardoner's public image, very much as the ironic conflict between aspiration and accomplishment in the Pardoner's Tale makes a satiric comment on a wrong view of the moral universe. We can be certain Chaucer put this irony in, both because it is so obvious and because the Pardoner himself points it out. But what of the Prioress? Devout and tender-hearted, she takes sadistic pleasure in the torture of the Jews. We may appeal to historical prejudices, but one wonders whether Chaucer was really limited to these, and the question remains open.

It becomes even more puzzling if we take another step backward in order to see some of the larger relationships in the Tales. Consider the relationship between the teller of the tale and the tale he tells. When, for example, the Wife of Bath asserts the eternal right of women to dominate their husbands, it is the Clerk who answers her. His story celebrates the duty of absolute obedience in wives. Do we smile when we recall that the Clerk is a cloistered scholar, lean, sober, studious, and unmarried? Or consider the relationship between two tales which Chaucer places cheek by jowl. For instance, the Monk, fat and arrogant, entertains the company with seventeen tragedies, each relating the sad fate of a great and prosperous man brought low by ill-fortune. He is followed by the Nun's Priest, silent, poor, and thin, a man who never has been and never will be prosperous, but who nevertheless tells a delightfully humorous fable in pointed contrast to the Monk's lugubrious tragedies. To point the contrast further, he decorates his comic little tale of a fox and a chicken with all the tragic paraphernalia the Monk has just used. Or consider certain of the relationships of a character to himself. The Pardoner, as we have said, is a complete religious hypocrite, fattening his purse by preaching against the very sin he is himself the most guilty of—avarice. And he is unrepentant; in fact, he is proud of his cleverness and moral hardness. But when he tells his dark tale of riot and death, it is not the other pilgrims who are impressed, it is he, and for a moment, quite unintentionally, he seems to reveal beneath his hard, braggadocio surface the fear and self-hatred which he hides chiefly from himself.

Finally, I want to suggest a set of relationships which is so complex that it is better experienced than explained, but I shall try. We know, as did Chaucer's readers in his own time, that he was an artist of wide reputation, and when we read the Canterbury Tales we know that this wise and practiced artist is telling us a story. In that story we make the acquaintance of another Chaucer, the pilgrim Chaucer, who is both like and unlike the first Chaucer we know, and he too is telling us the story. In his story are some thirty other pilgrims, and they, each in their turn, also tell the story. And in each of their stories are characters who, at their own level, have their own reality. The Canterbury Tales are in this aspect very like a set of Chinese boxes. As we read along we are quite often aware of only one box, as when we watch the pageantry of the Knight's Tale. Sometimes we are aware of two boxes at once, as when we think of the relationship between the Clerk's Tale and the Clerk who is telling it, or of the relationship between the real Chaucer and Chaucer the innocent pilgrim. But every once in a while Chaucer rattles three or four boxes at once, and the resultant ironies pretty much defy description. In his book on Chaucer G. K. Chesterton, alone among the critics I am familiar with, has made an attempt to describe one important effect of these interrelationships.

The Poet is the Maker; he is the creator of a cosmos; and Chaucer is the creator of the whole world of his creatures. He made the pilgrimage; he made the pilgrims. He made all the tales that are told by the pilgrims…. Then in due course, as the poet is also a pilgrim among other pilgrims, he is asked for his contribution. He is at first struck dumb with embarrassment; and then suddenly starts a gabble of the worst doggerel in the book…. [He] can only defend himself by saying sadly that this is the only poem he knows…. The point is in the admirable irony of the whole conception of the dumb or doggerel rhymer who is nevertheless the author of all the other rhymes; nay, even the author of their authors…. But the irony is wider and even deeper than that…. Chaucer has made a world of his own shadows, and, when he is on a certain plane, finds himself equally shadowy. It has in it all the mystery of the relation of the maker with things made. There falls on it from after even some dark ray of the irony of God, who was mocked when He entered His own world, and killed when He came among His creatures….

That is laughter in the grand style…. It is the presence of such things, behind the seeming simplicity … which constitutes … the greatness of Chaucer.

The question that naturally arises in our minds as we read Chesterton's remarks and consider the sort of ironic juxtapositions I sketched above, the first question that has to be answered, is whether all this irony is really there. Are we writing our own Canterbury Tales? We may answer the question by saying that for the reader who feels these philosophic ironies strongly, they are there. Right you are if you think you are. And if it is not taken in a naive way, this is a sensible answer. But it does not get rid of one historical question. If Chaucer ever re-read all the manuscripts at once, did he see that he had put these ironies in? Did he feel them as an essential element in the work he envisioned? We may well wonder. After all, what we read are fragments, fragments which probably create accidental impressions that would not be created if our responses were controlled by a complete work of art. And does not any long, comprehensive, various work inevitably generate the sort of ironies we are dealing with here? If we read half a dozen fragments of Tom Jones or the Decameron, could we are not take off on a flight of fancy like Chesterton's?

Granting that these considerations should make us cautious, I am nevertheless inclined to think that Chaucer fully intended the ironic world some readers feel. He was, after all, an ironic fellow. We are certain of many of his verbal ironies, and they are not the narrow, virulent irony of dogmatic controversy but the irony of a fine discrimination and an unfailing sense of proportion. Moreover, the world view that was second nature to a man of Chaucer's age made an ironic vision of human life quite as available as does our own. Indeed, if we divest ourselves of the provincial superiority of modernism, we will see that the medieval view perhaps led more naturally than ours does to such a vision. We will remember Dante gazing down from Saturn: "With my sight I turned back through all and every of the seven spheres, and saw this globe such that I smiled at its sorry semblance"; and we will remember Troilus gazing down from the eighth sphere at "this little spot of earth … thiswretched world," and laughing.

An awareness of this medieval vision helps us to accept the presence of broad philosophic ironies in the Canterbury Tales. It also helps us to see the exact nature of those ironies and thus to answer the question from which we started: To what extent, precisely, are the Canterbury Tales as a whole a work of satire? A comparison with Point Counter Point, to choose a modern novel which is in many ways similar to the Tales (even in the Chinese boxes of creator and creation), will be useful here. That novel is notoriously full of philosophic irony. When we examine the lives of Lucy, Walter, Illidge, the Tantamounts, old Bidlake, Webley, Quarles Junior and Senior, we find that in every case the event of the character's hopes and aspirations is only ironic defeat. When we move from the world of one character to the world of another, we find that from the point of view of A, B is wrong, from the point of view of B, C is wrong, and so on around the circle. Everything is cancelled out by something else and in the end we can only turn up empty hands.

It is tempting to read the Canterbury Tales in this way. The Clerk and the Wife of Bath, the fabliaux and the "Franklin's Tale," Chaucer the Creator and Chaucer the gabbling storyteller, all seem to balance each other off. Yet no sooner do we make such a statement than we realize how wrong it is, for everything in the Canterbury Tales is not really cancelled out by something else. We recall the firmness of Chaucer's verbal irony, we realize that the Wife and the fabliaux cancel out the Clerk and the "Franklin's Tale" only on this little spot of earth, and we hear Troilus laughing in the eighth sphere. Chaucer does not leave us with empty hands; as Virginia Woolf remarks, "we absorb morality at every pore." No doubt, in the practical chaos of our pilgrimage through this world, it does seem that every human vision is partial and all human life pointlessly ironic, but from the eighth sphere we may laugh and turn our faces upward.

If, then, satire is "militant irony," if "its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured," the Canterbury Tales as a whole, a comprehensive pattern which governs all the individual tales, romantic, tragic, farcical, melodramatic, do indeed seem to be satiric. But if Chaucer had finished his work, had taken his commuly back to the Tabard for a grand feast celebrating the end of their successful journey, would not the Tales, like Dante's great poem, be a comedy? The answer to this question is probably yes—and irrelevant. We do not have the finished work, and because we do not, the pattern of what we do have is that of satire. Not, I hasten to add, satire of the gloomy sort that Gulliver and the Dunciad end with. Though at bottom Chaucer's view of humanity was probably not widely different from Swift's, he seems to have been the most cheerful and serene of men. The native cast of his mind led him, as it led Dryden, to understand and to appreciate many sides to many questions. But his awareness of the grain of truth or of humanity in conflicting points of view did not make him depressed and neurotic, as it makes so many of our modern ironists. He accepted this state of affairs, this confusion and contradiction, as the inevitable condition of human life; like Sophocles, he knew that "all the generations of mortal man add up to nothing." But in the Canterbury Tales he chose to face the human condition not with sorrow or anger but with serene laughter from the eighth sphere.