Again, some care has been taken to preserve Chaucer’s melody. The italicised “e” is to be very lightly sounded, so lightly that the sound is hinted at rather than heard, and the pronunciation of this gently- dropping “e” is the pronunciation of the “a” in the word “china,” when the reader whispers the word “china.” With this simple rule, the Chaucerian line, an ordinary line of ten syllables, will be found to be generally musical and again and again to be music itself. For, to be thoroughly appreciated, the Tales must be read aloud.

I have now explained my offence. I have done no more than many other modernising editors, except for this, that the version I submit to the reader is, I hope, nearer to Chaucer than theirs. And to the modern reader I leave it, adding the beautiful words which Lowell says should be the inscription on Chaucer’s works—words which, from Chaucer’s own pen, best describe the pleasure that awaits in every age the reader of the “Canterbury Tales”:—

Of Geoffrey Chaucer little is known. He is said to have been born in 1340, and his life ended with the century. At the age of seventeen he was in the service of an aristocratic house, and two years later he was fighting in France, where the Hundred Years War had began. He was taken prisoner, but was soon ransomed, and before the age of thirty he had married (probably a lady whose sister was John of Gaunt’s wife) and was again fighting in France. Thus, already, courtly houses, captivity, the humours and horrors of war were known to him by experience; and of all of them he writes vividly in the Knightes Tale and in many other places. Very soon afterwards we find Chaucer engaged on foreign missions—sometimes in Italy, sometimes in France; and his first civil employment was that of Comptroller of Customs in London. At the age of forty-six Chaucer sat in the Parliament as a knight of the shire for Kent, and later he received an appointment as Clerk of the King’s Works. From this time to his death he was again and again in straits for money, and he seems always to have been anticipating or selling such pensions as he had. He died in 1400. The piety of Nicholas Brigham (1556) built or rebuilt his tomb in Westminster Abbey, and no more fitting line could have been engraved on it than the one chosen, “Requies aerumnarum mors”: or as Chaucer himself writes it:—

Deth is the end of every worldly sore.

The motto and the other lines on the tomb sadly need regilding. Above the tomb is the Chaucer window.

It is customary to speak in all prefaces of Chaucer’s humour and of his power as a narrator; now and then a critic like Lowell (in “My Study Windows”) lays deserved stress on the melody of his verse. But it is difficult to know where to begin when we enumerate Chaucer’s excellencies, and instead of this, let us see him as he is. In the Tales he stands self-revealed; and the rest of this introduction is but an attempt to show the real Chaucer, by calling attention to a few lines in which his own heart speaks.

Before all else we must recognise his delight in life:—