e as far
from the crude illuminations of degenerate minstrels as from La
Calprenede's heroic romances; the characters have muscles, bones and
sinews, and at the same time, hearts and souls; they are real men. The
date of "Troilus and Criseyde" is a great date in English literature.

The book, like Froissart's collection of poems, treats "of love." It
relates how Criseyde, or Cressida, the daughter of Calchas, left in Troy
while her father returned to the Greek camp, loves the handsome knight
Troilus, son of Priam. Given back to the Greeks, she forgets Troilus,
who is slain.

How came this young woman, as virtuous as she was beautiful, to love
this youth, whom at the opening of the story she did not even know? What
external circumstances brought them together, and what workings of the
heart made them pass from indifference to doubts and anxieties, and then
to love? These two orders of thought are untwined simultaneously, on
parallel lines by Chaucer, that dreamer who had lived so much in real
life, that man of action who had dreamed so many dreams.

Troilus despised love, and mocked at lovers:

If knight or squyer of his companye
Gan for to syke, or lete his eyen bayten
On any woman that he coude aspye;
He wolde smyle, and holden it folye,
And seye him thus, "God wot she slepeth softe
For love of thee, whan thou tornest ful ofte."[510]

One day, in the temple, he sees Cressida, and his fate is sealed; he
cannot remove his gaze from her; the wind of love has swept by; all his
strength has vanished; his pride has fallen as the petals fall from a
rose; he drinks deep draughts of an invincible poison. Far from her, his
imagination completes what reality had begun: seated on the foot of his
bed, absorbed in thought, he once more sees Cressida, and sees her so
beautiful, depicted in outlines so vivid, and colours so glowing, that
this divine image fashioned in his own brain is henceforth the only one
he will behold; forever will he have before his eyes that celestial form
of superhuman beauty, never more the real earthly Cressida, the frail
daughter of Calchas. Troilus is ill for life of the love illness.

He has a friend, older than himself, sceptical, trivial, experienced,
"that called was Pandare," Cressida's uncle. He confides to him his
woes, and asks for help. Pandarus, in Boccaccio, is a young nobleman,
sceptical too, but frivolous, disdainful, elegant, like a personage of
Musset. Chaucer