CHAUCER. 187 



poet, Dante; and contemporary with him was one supremely 

 elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only seven years before 

 Chaucer was born, and, so far as culture is derived from books, 

 the moral and intellectual influences they had been subjected 

 to, the speculative stimulus that may have given an impulse to 

 their minds there could have been no essential difference 

 between them. Yet there are certain points of resemblance and 

 of contrast, and those not entirely fanciful, which seem to me of 

 considerable interest. Both were of mixed race, Dante cer 

 tainly, Chaucer presumably so. Dante seems to have inherited 

 on the Teutonic side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous 

 irritability of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism which 

 made him the first of Christian poets first in point of time and 

 first in point of greatness. From the other side he seems to 

 have received almost in overplus a feeling of order and propor 

 tion, sometimes wellnigh hardening into mathematical precision 

 and formalism a tendency which at last brought the poetry of 

 the Romanic races to a dead-lock of artifice and decorum. 

 Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from the South a certain 

 airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of phrase, and an 

 elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented and hardly yet matched 

 in our literature, but all the while kept firm hold of his native 

 soundness of understanding, and that genial humour which 

 seems to be the proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, 

 life represented the passage of the soul from a state of nature to 

 a state of grace ; and there would have been almost an even 

 chance whether (as Burns says) the Divina Commedia had 

 turned out a song or a sermon, but for the wonderful genius of 

 its author, which has compelled the sermon to sing and the song 

 to preach, whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is a 

 pilgrimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with the 

 varieties of costume and character. There are good morals to 

 be found in Chaucer, but they are always incidental. With 

 Dante the main question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer 

 it is the conduct of life. The distance between them is almost 

 that between holiness and prudence. Dante applies himself to 

 the realities and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former 

 is consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is the more 

 truly national one. Dante represents the justice of God, and 

 Chaucer his loving-kindness. If there is anything that may pro 

 perly be called satire in the one, it is like a blast of the Divine 

 wrath, before which the wretches cower and tremble, which 

 rends away their cloaks of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly 



