morning and the daisy introduce the Legende. But there is no comparison between the workmanship of the two periods, and whereas that of the first is loose and disjointed, that of the second-except perhaps in the case of the Hous of Fame, which is more than half comic, a sort of travesty of the Divina Commedia, and therefore not to be judged by strict rules-that of the second is compact, well-ordered, and guided by the true artist's mastery over his materials. Italy in fact gave to Chaucer at precisely the right moment just that stimulus and that external standard which he required for the true completion of his work; and rendered him in its own way the same service that the study of Greek rendered to Europe in general a century later. His debt to Italy was both direct and indirect. From Dante, whose genius was so wholly unlike his own, he took a great number of isolated passages (the Troylus and the Parlement especially are full of reminiscences of the great Florentine); and he took also, as we said, the hint for the Hous of Fame, that most notable burlesque poem, where the serious meaning lies so near to the humorous outside. From Petrarch,

'Whos rethorykë sweete

Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye,'

he took, besides minor borrowings, the Clerkes Tale, almost exactly translating it from the laureate's Latin rendering of Boccaccio's story. From Boccaccio, whom by a strange irony of literary fortune he seems not to have known by name, he freely translated his two longest and, in a sense, greatest poems, Troylus and Criseyde and The Knightes Tale; and it is possible, though by no means certain, that the framework of the Canterbury Tales was suggested by the Decameron. But more important than this direct debt was what he indirectly owed to these great writers. He first learnt from them the art of constructing a story, that art which, as he afterwards developed it, has made of him unquestionably our chief narrative poet. It was from them-for, strange to say, he had read Virgil without learning it-that he first learnt the necessity of self-criticism; of that severe process, so foreign to the mediæval mind, which deliberates, sifts, tests, rejects, and alters, before a work is sent out into the world.

So much for Chaucer's books and their effect on him. Were there however no more in him than what his books put into him, he would be of no greater importance to us than Gower or Lydgate. It takes more than learning, more than a gift for

selection and adaptation, to make a poet. Those intimate verses which we have quoted from the Legende themselves, proceed to tell us of a passion which is stronger in him than the passion for reading. I reverence my books,' he says,

་

'So hertely that there is gamë noon

That fro my bokës maketh me to goon
But yt be seldom on the holy day,

Save certeynly whan that the moneth of May
Is comen, and that I here the foules synge,
And that the flourës gynnen for to springe,
Farewel my boke, and my devocioun !'

What he here calls May, with its birds and flowers, really means
Nature as a whole; not external nature only, but the world with
its rich variety of sights and sounds and situations, especially its
most varied product, Man. As to his feeling for external nature,
indeed, it might be called limited; it is only to the birds and the
flowers, the 'schowres swote' and the other genial gifts of spring
that it seems to extend. Not only is there no trace in him of
that 'religion of Nature' which is so powerful a factor in modern
poetry, but there is nothing that in the least resembles those
elaborate backgrounds in which the genius of Spenser takes such
delight. Nay, in the poet to whom we owe the immortal group
of pilgrims, there is little even of that minute local observation
of places and their features, that memory for the grave-covered
plains of Arles or the shattered banks of the Adige, which made
a part of Dante's genius, and gives such vividness to the phantom
landscape of his poem.
While the Inferno has been mapped out
for centuries, it is only to-day, after long discussion, that our
scholars are able to make a map of the pilgrimage to Canterbury.
But although the distinctive sense of landscape is for the most
part absent, how keen is the poet's eye for colour, for effective
detail! Who but Chaucer, while avoiding altogether the inven-
tory style of the ordinary romancer, a style on which he himself
poured ridicule in his Sir Thopas, could have brought such
a glittering barbaric presence before us as this of the King of
Inde?—

The gret Emetrius, the King of Inde,
Upon a stede bay trapped in stele
Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,
Came riding like the god of armës, Mars.
His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars

Couched with perles white and round and grete;
His sadel was of brent gold new ybete;
His mantelet upon his shouldre hanging
Bret-ful of rubies red as fyr sparkling;
His crispë heer like ringes was yronne,

And that was yelwe and glitered as the sonne...

And as a leon he his looking cast.'

Or such a sketch in black and white as this first glimpse of Creseide ?

Among these other folke was Creseide

In widowes habit blak: but nathëles
Right as our firstë lettre is now an A
In beautee first so stood she makeles1;
Her goodly looking gladed all the prees 2.
Nas never seen thing to be praised derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre,
As was Creseide, they sayden everichone
That her behelden in her blakke wede.'

Or such an intense and concentrated piece of colour as his
Chanticlere?-

'His comb was redder than the fyn coral
And batayled as it were a castel wal;

His bil was blak and as the geet3 it schon ;
Like asure were his legges and his ton';

His nayles whiter than the lily flour,

And like the burnischt gold was his colour.'

As for the world of man and human character, it is here admittedly that Chaucer's triumphs have been greatest. In this respect his fame is so well established that there is little need to dwell on qualities with which he makes his first and deepest impression, and which moreover will be abundantly illlustrated by the extracts which follow. In his treatment of external nature, there are limits beyond which Chaucer cannot go the limits of his time, of a more certain, a more easily satisfied age than ours. But in his sympathy with man, with human action and human feeling, his range is very great and his handling infinitely varied. The popular opinion of centuries has fixed upon the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales as his masterpiece, because it is there that this dramatic power of his, this realistic gift which can grasp at will 1 without mate or peer.

2 crowd.

8

jet.

toes.

almost any phase of character or incident, noble or trivial, passionate or grotesque, finds its fullest scope. Other fourteenthcentury writers can tell a story (though none indeed so well as he), can be tragic, pathetic, amusing; but none else of that day can bring the actual world of men and women before us with the movement of a Florentine procession-picture and with a colour and a truth of detail that anticipate the great Dutch masters of painting. To pass from the framework of other medieval collections, even from the villa and gardens of the Decameron, to Chaucer's group of pilgrims, is to pass from convention to reality. To reality; for, as Dryden says in that Preface which shows how high he stood above the critical level of his age, in the Prologue 'we have our forefathers and great-grandames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days; their general characters are still remaining in mankind, and even in England, though they are called by other names than those of Monks and Friars, and Canons, and Lady Abbesses, and Nuns: for mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered.'

It is not enough for a poet to observe, however: what he observes must first be transformed by feeling before it can become matter for poetry. What distinguishes Chaucer is that he not only observes truly and feels keenly, but that he keeps his feeling fresh and unspoiled by his knowledge of books and of affairs. As the times went he was really learned, and he passed a varied active existence in the Court, in the London custom-house, and in foreign missions on the king's service. From his life his poetry only gained; the Knight, the Friar, the Shipman-nay, even young Troylus and Constance and 'Emilye the schene,'—are what they are by virtue of his experience of actual human beings. But it is even more notable that the study of books, in an age when study so often led to pedantry, left him as free and human as it found him; and that his joy in other men's poetry, and his wish to reproduce it for his countrymen, still gave way to the desire to render it more beautiful and more true. Translator and imitator as he was, what strikes us in his work from the very earliest date is his independence of his models. Even when he wrote the Boke of the Duchesse, at a time when he was a mere novice in literature, he could rise and did rise above his material, so that one enthusiastic Chaucerian, in his desire to repel M. Sandras' charge of 'imitation servile,' flatly refuses to believe that Chaucer ever read Machault's 'Dit' at all. This indeed is too patriotic criticism; but

it is certainly true to say that Chaucer worked up Machault and Ovid in this poem, as he worked up his French and Italian materials generally, so as thoroughly to subordinate them to his own purpose. The most striking instance of this free treatment of his model is, of course, his rendering of the Troylus and the Knightes Tale from Boccaccio. The story of Palamon and Arcite possessed a great fascination for Chaucer, and it seems certain that he wrote it twice, in two quite distinct forms. With the earlier, in stanzas, which has perished except for what he has embodied in one or two other writings, we are not concerned; but it is open to any one to compare the Knightes Tale, in the final shape in which Chaucer's mature hand has left it to us, with the immense romantic epic of Boccaccio. Tyrwhitt's blunt commonsense long since pointed out the ethical inferiority of the Teseide; and we may point in the same way to the judgment that Chaucer has shown in stripping off episodes, in retrenching Boccaccio's mythological exuberance, in avoiding frigid personifications, and in heightening the interest of the end by the touches which he adds in his magnificent description of the Temple of Mars. In the 'Troylus' the difference between the two poets is even deeper, for . it is a difference as much moral as artistic. Compare those young Florentine worldlings-for such they are-Troilo and Pandaro, with the boyish, single-minded, enthusiastic, pitiable Troylus, and his older friend who stands by to check his passionate excesses with a proverb and again a proverb, like Sancho by the side of the Knight of la Mancha; worldly experience controlling romance ! Compare Griseida, that light-o'-love, that heroine of the Decameron, with the fragile, tender-hearted and remorseful Cryseyde, who yields through sheer weakness to the pleading and the sorrow of 'this sodeyn Diomede' as she has yielded to her Trojan lover!

Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde

Ferther than the storie wol devyse;
Hire name, allas! is published so wyde,
That for hire gilte it ought ynough suffise;
And if I mighte excuse her any wyse,
For she so sory was for her untrouthe,

Ywis I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe.'

'Routhe' indeed, pity for inevitable sorrow, is a note of Chaucer's mind which for ever distinguishes him from Boccaccio, and marks him out as the true forerunner of the poet of Hamlet and Othello.