CHAUCER. 173 



the poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth having 

 as respects the training of the poet, and the obstacles of 

 fashion and taste through which he had to force his way 

 before he could find free play for his native genius or even 

 so much as arrive at a consciousness thereof. M. Sandras 

 is in every way a worthy pupil of the accomplished M. Victor 

 Leclerc, and, though he lays perhaps a little too much stress on 

 the indebtedness of Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly 

 intelligent and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his 

 claim to greatness and originality. It is these grounds which I 

 propose chiefly to examine here. 



The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any so-called 

 national literature, is that which Farinata addressed to Dante 

 Chi fur li maggior tuif Here is no question of plagiarism, for 

 poems are not made of words, and thoughts, and images, but of 

 t^iat something in the poet himself which can compel them to 

 obey him and move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that 

 the new poet, however late he come, can never be forestalled, 

 and the shipbuilder who built the pinnace of Columbus has as 

 much claim to the discovery of America as he who suggests a 

 thought by which some other man opens new worlds to us has to 

 a share in that achievement by him unconceived and incon 

 ceivable. Chaucer undoubtedly began as an imitator, perhaps 

 as mere translator, serving the needful apprenticeship in the use 

 of his tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and 

 catching the words of those who know how already, and poets 

 learn in the same way from their elders. They import their raw 

 material from any and everywhere, and the question at last 

 comes down to this whether an author have original force 

 enough to assimilate all he has acquired, or that be so over 

 mastering as to assimilate him. If the poet turn out the stronger, 

 we allow him to help himself from other people with wonderful 

 equanimity. Should a man discover the art of transmuting 

 metals, and present us with a lump of gold as large as an ostrich- 

 egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too nicely whether 

 he had stolen the lead ? 



Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not sudden 

 prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits by the foregone 

 lives of immemorial vegetable races that have worked-over the 

 juices of earth and air into organic life out o*f tvhose dissolution 

 a soil migty; gather fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so 

 we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew 

 the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long succession 



