CHAUCER. 185 



kind that brief creed of conscience Here am I : God heip 

 me : I cannot otherwise. This, it seems to me, with dogged 

 sense of justice both results of that equilibrium of thought 

 which springs from clear-sighted understanding makes the 

 beauty of the Saxon nature. 



He believes in another world, and conceives of it without 

 metaphysical subtleties as something very much after the pattern 

 of this, but infinitely more desirable. Witness the vision of 

 John Bunyan. Once beat it into him that his eternal well-being, 

 as he calls it, depends on certain conditions, that only so will 

 the balance in the ledger of eternity be in his favour, and the 

 man who seemed wholly of this world will give all that he has, 

 even his life, with a superb simplicity and scorn of the theatric, 

 for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his very solidity of 

 nature makes him terrible when once fairly set agoing. He is 

 the man of all others slow to admit the thought of revolution ; 

 but let him once admit it, he will carry it through and make it 

 stick a secret hitherto undiscoverable by other races. 



But poetry is not made out of the understanding ; that is not 

 the sort of block out of which you can carve wing-footed Mer 

 curies. The question of common-sense is always, What is it 

 good for ? a question which would abolish the rose and be 

 answered triumphantly by the cabbage. The danger of the 

 prosaic type of mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority which 

 blinds it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does 

 not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not remember 

 how the all-observing and all-fathoming Shakspeare has typified 

 this in Bottom, the weaver ? Surrounded by all the fairy crea 

 tions of fancy, he sends one to fetch him the bag of a humble- 

 bee, and can find no better employment for Mustard-seed than 

 to help Cavalero Cobweb scratch his ass s head between the 

 ears. When Titania, queen of that fair ideal world, offers him 

 a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a pottle 

 of hay ! 



The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of their own. 

 They produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and legends of 

 saints in worse metre. Their earlier poetry is essentially Scan 

 dinavian. It was that gens indytissima Northmannorum that 

 imported the divine power of imagination that power which, 

 mingled with the solid Saxon understanding, produced at last 

 the miracle of Stratford. It was to this adventurous race, which 

 found America before Columbus, which, for the sake of freedom 

 of thought, could colonise inhospitable Iceland, which, as it 



