1 88 CHAUCER. 



propriety, and leaves them shivering in the cruel nakedness of 

 their shame. The satire of the other is genial with the broad 

 sunshine of humour, into which the victims walk forth with a 

 delightful unconcern, laying aside of themselves the disguises 

 that seem to make them uncomfortably warm, till they have 

 made a thorough betrayal of themselves so unconsciously that 

 we almost pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the punishment 

 of sins against God and one s neighbour, in order that we may 

 shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits them in the 

 other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the transmuter of 

 metals, of the begging friars, and of the pedlars of indulgences, 

 in order that we maybe on our guard against them in this world. 

 If we are to judge of what is national only by the highest and 

 most characteristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer 

 the true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, with an 

 imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider reach of thought, 

 yet took the same delight in the pageantry of the actual world, 

 and whose moral is the moral of worldly wisdom only heightened 

 to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the 

 dramatic energy of his plastic nature. 



Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life which so 

 inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself says of the 

 heavens, part answers to part with mutual interchange of light, 

 he had a structural faculty which distinguishes him from all other 

 English poets, his contemporaries, and which indeed is the pri 

 mary distinction of poets properly so called There is, to be 

 sure, only one other English writer coeval with himself who de 

 serves in any way to be compared with him, and that rather for 

 contrast than for likeness. 



With the single exception of Langland, the English poets, his 

 contemporaries, were little else than bad versifiers of legends 

 classic or mediaeval, as happened, without selection and without 

 art. Chaucer is the first who broke away from the dreary tra 

 ditional style, and gave not merely stories, but lively pictiires of 

 real life as the ever-renewed substance of poetry. He was a 

 reformer, too, not only in literature, but in morals. But as in the 

 former his exquisite tact saved him from all eccentricity, so in 

 the latter the pervading sweetness of his nature could never be 

 betrayed into harshness and invective. He seems incapable of 

 indignation. He mused good-naturedly over the vices and 

 follies of men, and, never forgetting that he was fashioned of the 

 same clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There is no 

 touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante s brush seems some- 



