1 86 CHAUCER. 



were, typifying the very action of the imaginative faculty itself, 

 identified itself always with what it conquered, that we owe 

 whatever aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy 

 of the English race. It was through the Normans that the 

 English mind and fancy, hitherto provincial and uncouth, were 

 first infused with the lightness, grace, and self-confidence of 

 Romance literature. They seem to have opened a window to 

 the southward in that solid and somewhat sombre insular cha 

 racter, and it was a painted window all aglow with the figures 

 of tradition and poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with 

 legends of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated 

 with the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate and 

 more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur and his knights, 

 toward which the stern Dante himself relented so far as to call 

 them gratissimas ambages most delightful circumlocutions 

 though of British origin, were first set free from the dungeon 

 of a barbarous dialect by the French poets, and so brought 

 back to England, and made popular there by the Normans. 



Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as truly a 

 mother tongue as English, was familiar with all that had been 

 done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In him we see the first result 

 of the Norman yeast upon the home-baked Saxon loaf. The 

 flour had been honest, the paste well kneaded, but the inspiring 

 leaven was wanting till the Norman brought it over. Chaucer 

 works still in the solid material of his race, but with what airy 

 lightness has he not infused it ? Without ceasing to be English, 

 he has escaped from being insular. But he was something 

 more than this; he was a scholar, a thinker, and a critic. He 

 had studied the Divina Commedia of Dante, he had read Pe- 

 trarca and Boccaccio, and some of the Latin poets. He calls 

 Dante the great poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It 

 is plain that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, and 

 had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehending the 

 aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. He saw clearly 

 and felt keenly what were the faults and what the wants of the 

 prevailing literature of his country. In the Monk s Tale he 

 slily satirises the long-winded morality of Gower, as his prose 

 antitype Fielding was to satirise the prolix sentimentality of 

 Richardson. In the rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the coup de 

 grace to the romances of Chivalry, and in his own choice of a 

 subject he heralds that new world in which the actual and the 

 popular were to supplant the fantastic and the heroic. 



Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one great 



